The Mocking Program

The bestselling author of the Spellsinger and Flinx series delivers a suspenseful high-tech police procedural set in a gritty, near future Los Angeles.Angel Cardenas is a hard-working police detective in 21st century Los Angeles. But Cardenas is no ordinary copas an intuit he possesses the special talent of knowing what others will do in any given situation. When a businessman is found murdered, missing his vital organs and all his money, Cardenas is on the case. His investigation takes him to the victims home, where an explosion nearly kills him. Now, he has to figure out where the woman and the young girl who had been living there have disappeared to. And why doesnt the victims I.D. match his DNA scan? Exploring the underworlds of Los Angeles,Cardenas will stop at nothing in his search for The Mock, a stone-cold killer who will do anything to get what he wants.

Bestseller Foster (The Dig; Interlopers; etc.) elevates this well-paced, hard-boiled SF police procedural through the use of a highly imaginative setting the sprawling Montezuma Strip, which stretches along the old U.S.-Mexican border and constitutes "the western hemisphere's largest concentration of industry, commerce, assemblage, cutting-edge technology, and trouble." When police inspector Angel Cardenas investigates the case of a male corpse found with most of its internal organs missing ("They'd left the heart. Not much of a demand for hearts these days. Not with good, cheap artificial models flooding the market"), the victim turns out to have had two identities one as a local executive, the other as a Texas businessman. The plot thickens when the victim's booby-trapped house nearly kills Cardenas and his partner. After a few more near escapes, they establish that the corpse's "wife and daughter" are actually Surtsey and Katla Mockerkin, the ex-wife and 12-year-old daughter of crime lord Cleator Mockerkin, who wants them back in (literally) the worst way. By now Cardenas is sufficiently determined to follow them to Central America, aided by his training as an almost telepathic intuit. The amazingly versatile author plays with a full deck of futuristic elements notably, sapient apes led by gorillas and intelligent rogue computers that commit computer crimes. An ambiguous but nonetheless satisfying ending leaves open the possibility of another story about Inspector Cardenas.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

A couple of decades ago, Foster was known primarily as the author of science fiction and fantasy novels aimed at younger readers, novelizations of movies (Starman, Alien), and installments in popular series (the Star Trek log books, an Alien Nation novel). Over the years, he's broadened his scope, producing original, gripping novels for adults. This story, set not too far in the future, features a police inspector trying to sort out a rather unusual murder: a recently discovered corpse seems to belong to two men. So who's really dead? And how can Angel Cardenas find the truth when everyone connected to the victim(s) appears to have gone missing? The novel has a solid plot, but what makes it interesting is the detailed dialect the author has devised. Like Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, this novel comes with a glossary to help readers translate the characters' slang (a combination of English and Spanish, mostly). Peppered with clever new technology and offbeat characters, the book successfully crosses genres and will appeal to both mystery and sf fans. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Prolific author of perennial best sellers (e.g., The Dig), Foster offers an entertaining cross between the police procedural and sf genres. Angel Cardenas of the Namerican States Federales is a police inspector whose beat is the Strip, a megalopolis that encompasses Mexico and part of what used to be the United States. A routine investigation of what appears to be a mugging death soon leads to something unlike anything Cardenas has ever encountered, and he needs all of his considerable skills to track down the body and penetrate the wake of death that surrounds the victim's wife, Surtsey, and her daughter, Katla. Several parties are criminally intent on harming the women; Cardenas wants to find out why and how to protect them. Cardenas is an appealing character, and his antagonists are as colorful as they are imaginatively deadly. The only stiff character is 12-year-old Katla, who, even accounting for her renowned precociousness, comes across flat. But Foster makes up for that with a richly envisioned future of high-tech urban sprawl that calls to mind a less dystopian Blade Runner. For general fiction and sf collections.
- Devon Thomas, Hass MS&L, Ann Arbor, MI
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.