Vampire Bytes : A Crime Novel with Catherine Sayler

Marilyn Stasio

...her open-minded attitude toward the adolescent imagination is refreshing. -- New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Role-playing games (RPGs)virtual and actualtake 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. (Apr.)

VOYA

San Francisco detective Catherine Sayler has been given custody of her fifteen-year-old niece, Molly, who has a history of running away. Jesse Price is Catherine's business partner who specializes in cases involving children and teens. One evening Catherine and Jesse are confused by the activities of a group of teens on the neighborhood streets, and Molly explains that they are LARPing-participating in a role-playing game that evolved out of Dungeons and Dragons. Soon after this encounter, Catherine is hired by a small computer software company to locate Matt Demming, who has stolen essential computer codes. At nearly the same time, Molly's mother asks Catherine to visit a friend whose daughter, Chloe, has disappeared. Catherine discovers that Matt's body was found murdered in a curious manner, and that Chloe was seen leaving a LARP game with him. Publicity about the murder and games involving vampires provokes the involvement of a local religious leader and a police expert on cults. Chloe fears for her life and the safety of her family (she has the missing computer information). She also fears disapproval about her involvement in LARP and while she wants to cooperate with the authorities, she finds friends to help her hide. As Catherine tries to get some straight answers, she decides that with Jesse's help, Molly can try to contact Chloe, who eventually becomes the only one who can draw out the killer. Grant has written other mysteries involving this detective, but the attraction of this one for YAs is the focus on teens, computer action, and LARP. The writing is solid, the characters believable, and the action reasonably well paced. The relationships between the young people and the adults in this book are nicely done and profile a wide range of parent-teen relationships. This is not a standout mystery, but there is enough action to keep the reader interested up until the last scene. VOYA Codes: 3Q 4P S (Readable without serious defects, Broad general YA appeal, Senior High-defined as grades 10 to 12).

Kirkus Reviews

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.