The White Tower
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
"Jumpers," McCallum was saying. "Jumpers are - well, in my experience jumpers are always badly disturbed. They choose to jump because it's so violent." Niall Howley has been spending night after night playing an interactive computer game when he's found dead at the bottom of the Telstra tower in Canberra. From a graphic left on his computer, it is apparent that his actual death mimics in an eerie way the death already scripted for him in the game. The police and the coroner call it suicide, but Niall's mother hires Sandra Mahoney, computer crime consultant, to help her understand what has really happened. This is the second book in Dorothy Johnston's crime series following "The Trojan Dog", which was joint winner of the 2001 ACT Book of the Year and won the "Age" Best of 2000 in the Crime section. Johnston's "One For The Master" (Wakefield Press 1997) and "Ruth" (1986) were short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award. "If you combined the two strands of Ruth Rendell and her alter writing ego, Barbara Vine, you'd come close to Dorothy Johnston's talent." - Ken Bruen, author of "The Guards"
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of Australian author Johnston's sequel to The Trojan Dog (2005), Sandra Mahoney stares at a carefully composed scene on a computer screen a young man dead on the rocks below a castle and wonders if it represents murder or suicide. A somewhat disjointed plot unfolds from this intriguing opening, as Sandra, a computer crime consultant, and her partner, Ivan Semyonov, retrace the life of the victim, Niall Howley, both at the hospital where he worked in radiology and on the Internet, where he became the Irish hero Ferdia in an elaborate game called Castle of Heroes. The details about Internet game playing and the bits of Irish folklore lend interest, but too many unnecessary details such as Sandra's repeated mentions of her baby Katya's hair distract. Well-knit prose and concise descriptions keep the energy level up and the action moving along, but some readers may feel cheated that the story dribbles to an end.