E-VENGEANCE

A university professor’s discovery of her spouse’s questionable online activities may tie her to a homicide in this murder mystery.

Both Isabelle Weston and her husband, Scott, are surprised when she catches him masturbating at a computer. Having spotted a screen name, Isabelle hacks into his AOL account—it’s 2004 —the next day at their New Jersey condo. She finds proof that Scott has engaged in explicit online chats with women. This alone upsets her, but Isabelle doesn’t want to sign divorce papers until she knows whether one or more of these virtual relationships has turned physical. So she creates her own account and, as “Maggie the Cat,” tries covertly interacting with Scott’s online persona. But when a fatal shooting has possible ties to Scott’s cyber activities, Isabelle fears Maggie will land her in trouble. Sure enough, Detective Antinori considers her a person of interest in the murder case. This results in Isabelle’s telling the detective a few lies and discarding potential evidence. She also learns even more about her husband’s virtual conquests as well as the possibility that Scott has been up to something that’s outright illegal. Williams creates an alluring mystery: The story opens with the murder before flashing back several weeks to Isabelle’s discovery. While the victim is known, the killer could be any number of suspects—even Isabelle. The couple’s periodic online chats are sometimes droll, especially with Scott unaware that Maggie is his wife. These furthermore make him increasingly unlikable, as his conversations are akin to an inexperienced adolescent’s chats. But Isabelle is an appealing protagonist, and the story aptly showcases the complexities of unfaithfulness in the virtual world. Numerous mistakes in the text are an unfortunate hindrance, including misspellings beyond the cyberchats (“The First Wife’s Club”; “breathe mints”) and anachronisms (Scott sports an iPhone).

An engaging but messy fusion of a wife’s cybersleuthing and an old-fashioned whodunit.