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Overview
Sally Chapman's mysteries enliven the sometimes arcane world of computers with a dose of murder, romance, and good humor. In Love Bytes, the budding technology of "virtual reality" provides the key to a killer's motive. Julie Blake has resigned her position at ICI, a major Silicon Valley company, to found an investigative agency specializing in computer fraud. With her partner/amore Vic Paoli, Julie looks forward to the freedom from corporate politics and to the challenge of sleuthing. But jobs are few, money is tight, and when bail bondswoman Lorna Donatello walks in with a missing-person case, Julie and Vic jump at the chance to take it on. Tracing Arnie Lufkin is difficult, for the renegade programming genius and accused embezzler has concealed his tracks with a variety of tricks that baffle even Julie's expertise. When a murder is committed, the search intensifies for a criminal who is never what or where he seems to be. Mystery readers and computer buffs alike will enjoy Love Bytes, a delightful sequel to Raw Data, the first book to feature Julie Blake and Vic Paoli.Trading her high-tech, high-stress Silicon Valley career for her own computer fraud investigations agency, Julie Blake embarks on her first case--the disappearance of Arnie Lufkin, a renegade programming genius and suspected embezzler. Wherever he is, Lufkin is playing deadly games, making murder a reality. Martin's Press.
Editorials
Stuart Miller
Julie Blake, first introduced in "Raw Data" (1991), returns in her second appearance, and it's about time, too. Again set in the Silicon Valley/San Francisco area and featuring computer nerds, this tale finds Julie about to open her own business investigating computer fraud, in partnership with Vic Paoli, her very hunky boyfriend. Their affair has progressed quite nicely, but their business is going nowhere. When Lorna Donatello, owner of a bail-bond business, asks them to find her missing boyfriend, Julie declines. But when it turns out that the boyfriend is Arnie Lufkin, the best-known virtual-reality programmer in the business, who has recently been arrested for embezzling half a million by hacking into his employer's general-ledger software, Vic persuades Julie that they should take the job even if it's not exactly computer fraud. Julie reluctantly agrees and almost immediately becomes the victim of a hacker, who interrupts her computer to warn her to back off from the search. This only whets her appetite, of course, and soon she is tracking Arnie by using the virtual-reality programs he left with Lorna. Chapman obviously knows the computer business inside out, and she uses it to great effect in this deftly plotted, wonderfully intriguing mystery. The only complaint is that we had to wait three years for Julie's second adventure--let's hope for a third in a third of the time.Book Details
Published
April 1, 1996
Publisher
Harlequin Books (Mm)
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780373261970