Fire Cracker
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
PJ Gray plays a high-stakes game of computer cat-and-mouse—with a man who doesn’t exist
Someone has hacked into the St. Louis Hospital, and not merely to steal information. The hacker alters patient results and drug dosages in the hospital’s computer network, with fatal consequences. Who better for the police to have on the case than PJ Gray, psychologist and master of forensic computer simulation? As Gray gets to work with her old-school partner Leo Schultz, the pair discover the killer’s trail to be far more opaque than usual: They’re chasing someone who’s successfully manufactured his own death. When they start to untangle his plot, they become part of it, as the brilliant murderer puts Gray to the toughest test she’s ever faced. An outstanding follow-up to Gray Matter, and featuring a techno-hunt worthy of Patricia Cornwell, Fire Cracker sizzles with suspense.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Will "Cracker" Carpenter is a veteran highway robber on the information highway, earning money by compiling confidential profiles. In Kennett's (Gray Matter) second novel, however, Cracker turns his skills in a deadly direction. He hacks into a hospital's computerized operating system and murders wealthy Rowena Clark by changing the computer records of her medical status and treatment protocols. But Clark is not his real target--Cracker's planning an elaborate trap for his stepmother, Mom Elly, who, he believes, killed his father. A tough homicide cop, Leo Schultz, suspects Dr. Graham, Clark's physician, a woman who appears to be hiding something. His partner (and boss), PJ Gray, isn't so sure. PJ directs the Computerized Homicide Investigation Project, a small, under-funded unit of four in the St. Louis Police Department. She's 40, a single mother with a 12-year-old boy, and she's an expert in using virtual reality as a crime-solving tool. Leo is boorish but real, a good counterpoint to PJ's first-class cyber-brain. Another patient's medical orders are altered by computer, and the patient dies of insulin overdose. Cracker stays one step ahead of PJ, seemingly all-powerful in his ability to cause death with a keystroke. The pace crackles when PJ enters the virtual hospital-room crime scene she's developed, first as "killer" and then as "victim." Kennett capably works the hig-tech angle, but the bang in Fire Cracker fizzles because we learn so much about Cracker's past that his next moves, and ultimately the outcome, fail to surprise us.
