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INTERCEPTION

A third try at genre-jumping from computer/sex/romance/hi-techie Watkins (Virus, 1995, etc.)—a hokey, sentimental, but up-to-the-minute story of love, death, depravity, and software abuse on the Internet, Can one find true love on the Internet? Watkins dedicates his bouncy tale to those who have, informing us that the tender e-mail that he attributes to his fictional heroine Andrea Lawrence was actually written by his own wife during their Internet courtship. So it is foreordained that Lawrence, a beautiful psychologist curious about the addictive effect of Internet chat rooms, will, in the parlance of the Internet, hyperlink with Grant Kingsley, a rugged former Navy SEAL now working as a horse trainer on a California dude ranch. Lawrence is on the rebound from a bad relationship; Kingsley, a superdad to his teenage son Todd, is still haunted by his wife's death in a car accident. Kingsley and Lawrence meet in the Hall of Sadness, a computer-generated chat room with walls, doors, secret passageways and avatars—cartoon stand-ins that mask the chatters' identities. Nature, if not technology, would freely take its course for the lovers if not for Sue5, a part human/part computer intelligence enslaved by the sadistic boss of a supersecret hi-tech laboratory that kidnaps Internet lovers, literally plugs them into computers, and sells their services to businesses (and government organizations) that need lightning-fast data processing. Will true love help Kingsley and Lawrence escape being kidnapped by the villains and reduced to ``human interfaces''? Will love cause Sue5 to pity the pair, hack her boss to pieces, and help Kingsley use his SEAL talents to rescue Lawrence and blow the lab sky high? A passable fantasy that confuses technologically-assisted social pathology with a sane life. Too contemporary for science- fiction fans, and the reliably described Internet procedures are in danger of growing obsolete by the time the book reaches paperback.

Pub Date: April 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-7867-0354-7

Page Count: 416

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997

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PLEASE SEE US

A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.

In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.

They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.

A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.

Pub Date: March 3, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

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