Vampire Bytes [SIGNED COPY, FIRST PRINTING WITH LETTER FROM AUTHOR]

When private investigator Catherine Sayler is hired to investigate the death of a young computer game developer from a bizarre Silicon Valley subculture, she matches wits with a minister looking to wreak vengeance on what he believes to be a satanic cult

Role-playing games (RPGs)?virtual and actual?take center stage in this perceptive sixth entry in Grant's series starring San Francisco Bay Area's technologically savvy PI Catherine Sayler (Lethal Genes, etc.). Catherine hires on with a computer gaming company to find its lead programmer, Matt Demming, who has fled and taken with him a new vampire game's source code. Before she gets very deeply into the case, the young man's body is found, drained of blood with two puncture wounds in his neck. Because Matt also played the role of a vampire in a live-action RPG taking place on the streets, the police are divided as to whether the killing is related to business (his computer and the code are still missing) or a cult. While the cops hash out their theories, egged on by a minister who has sworn to demolish all cults, Catherine agrees to help search for Chloe Dorn, the missing friend of her teenage niece. Chloe, Catherine learns, had been with Matt the evening he disappeared. E-mail, computer games and the Internet figure prominently as Grant expertly juggles the emotional and technological elements of the game players' fanciful, often terrifying world, where the lines separating fantasy and reality blur.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Matt Demming's never been able to keep his play separate from his work. Now Astra Software's flaky lead programmer, angered at his partner Ari Kazacos's refusal to draw up formal partnership papers, has skedaddled with the source code he developed for Astra's first game, Cult of Blood, and Kazacos is frantic to recover it. Even after Matt's found dead in the Baylands's Byxbee Park, Kazacos wants p.i. Catherine Sayler (Lethal Genes, 1996, etc.) to stay on the case. What makes Matt's murder especially creepy is the manner of his death: He was drained of blood by a puncture in his neck that looks just like the vampire bite favored by his playmates in the Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) game that provided a break from his work at Astra. Was Matt killed by an envious or greedy Astra associate, or--as anti-LARP activist Rev. Thomas Seaton and clueless Patrolman George Prizer insist--by one of the pretend vampires he spent his nights with? The disappearance of Chloe Dorn, the teenaged LAMPer who was with Matt minutes before he died, gives an extra edge to the case--and a dozen new ways the investigation can go wrong. Much solid background on role-playing games on and off the keyboard, as you'd expect from Grant, though the mystery is negligible and all the characters, from computer geeks to tattooed teen goths to self-righteous adult activists, are a little too simply themselves. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Live Action Role Playing (LARP): Is it something teenagers do just for fun? Or is it satanism? That's the question when a young man is brutally murdered, his body drained of blood, and his girlfriend suddenly goes missing. Matters become more complicated when the victim is discovered to possess a stolen code for a computer game poised to hit the market. When private detective Catherine Sayler is called in to investigate, she encounters a group of young adults keeping dangerous and guilty secrets, as well as some grown-ups determined to prove that LARPing is a pastime inspired by the devil. Grant's use of multiple first-person perspectives--Sayler's, the missing girl's, a police detective's, among others--gives the story a rather choppy feel, but she balances that nicely with a stark portrait of contemporary young adults on the fringe of society. There are a few less-outrageous teens and some responsible adults in the mix, but the countercultural dynamics are convincing and frightening enough to inspire nightmares, especially among parents who have teenagers at home. Stephanie Zvirin