YOU’VE GOT MURDER

Why would Zachary Malone, nonpareil programmer at Universal Library, have gone AWOL from cyberspace for five days? His friend Turing Hopper, concerned about his absence from work, e-mail, and online services, searches police and hospital records and credit-card databanks for some trace of him, but to no avail. The obvious move at this point would be to phone the police, but Turing can’t do that because she’s only an AIP—an Artificial Intelligence Personality that Zack created along with the likes of market analyst John Dow and chessmaster KingFischer. When the reams of mystery fiction Zack downloaded into Turing make her realize that she’s as homebound as Nero Wolfe, she goes in search of an Archie Goodwin, and finds two prospects—50ish secretary Maude Graham and programmer Tim Pincoski, who’s always been convinced that Turing’s a real person—willing to do the legwork that will tie Zack’s disappearance to the recent “accidental” death of his colleague and best friend, David Scanlan, and a deep-laid plot to cut all Universal’s AIP’s loose after blaming them for the corporation’s financial woes. The bizarre nature of the investigation limits the suspect pool to the sinister powers at Universal Security and their masters at Data Integrity Systems, but Andrews (Murder with Puffins, 2000, etc.) adroitly keeps up the suspense and even manages something of an eleventh-hour surprise.

Ever since HAL ran off the rails in 2001, it’s been only a matter of time since somebody put a computer to work on the right side of the law. Turing fills the bill with more energy and charm than most fictional detectives.