The Extremes

Amazon.com

A bizarre and horrible coincidence draws FBI special agent Teresa Simons to England: on the same day that a mass murderer killed her husband and fourteen others in Kingwood City, Texas, another spree killer massacred seventeen in the small Sussex town of Bulverton. Teresa seeks to understand her husband's death by exploring the similar but unrelated event in Bulverton, as she once explored reconstructions of historical mass murders in ExEx (Extreme Experience, a brutally realistic form of virtual reality) to train for her FBI job. In Bulverton she finds a commercial ExEx parlor, which, she is horrified and fascinated to discover, offers a Bulverton mass-murder scenario. As Teresa explores both the town and the scenario of Bulverton, the separations between reality and ExEx, between ExEx murder reconstructions, between past and present, begin to blur--and so does the separation between Kingwood City and Bulverton, as Teresa realizes the simultaneity of the events may be more than a coincidence.

A New York Times Recommended Book, The Extremes received the British Science Fiction Association award for 1999. Christopher Priest's previous novel, The Prestige, won the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Award. --Cynthia Ward

Book Description

Long regarded as "one of the masters of psychological fiction in America" (San Francisco Chronicle), Kate Wilhelm delivers one of her most probing---and most suspenseful---novels in The Deepest Water. Abby Connors's father, Jud, was a novelist whose career finally took off after three novels and years of hard work.Jud was also the most important man in Abby's life, to the chagrin of her husband Brice.When Jud is murdered in his Oregon lakefront cabin, Abby's life is overturned.Was the killer someone she knew?Fortunately, it seems she has a guide to direct her through the maze that is her life: Jud's last novel.If only she can see through the fiction to perceive the truth.Outwardly calm, yet irresistible, The Deepest Water grows more chilling---and more compelling---as the reader probes deeper into it.This novel is a blockbuster from one of America's best-loved storytellers.

Customer Reviews:

Not Free SF Reader.......2007-09-03

A somewhat underwhelming and slow novel. A female agent is taking a break for her job, mostly for psychological reasons, after her husband has been killed in an operation goes wrong.

She goes to a town in England where a crazed gunman ran wild, and starts exploring virtual reality situations through sophisticated and probably illegal software that replicates violent situations and training.

Somewhat pointless end, too.

a disappointment.......2003-12-04

The novel started out with a very strong and intriguing beginning, but by the second half it was getting really tedious with the protagonist's repeated virtual experiences and a loss of direction to the story. I can't list all the disappointments that came out of the end of the novel -- they would be spoilers -- but whatever the author was trying to accomplish in the limp ending was certainly lost on me.

No payoff !!! I Feel Foolish For Hanging In There !!.......2002-11-11

By the time I got two thirds of the way through, I had devised three or four potential endings in my mind and was looking forward to the author's take. WHAT A LETDOWN. I now feel embarrassed that I invested all this time just to witness a complete and total LACK of anything even resembling an ending. With about 20 pages to go, I realized something was fishy. I should have seen it coming. The first half of the book gives absolutely NO CLUE whatsoever what the point of the book is.

I was disappointed with the blatant anti-gun message. Now that I know the author is English, it makes sense, but hey, America is the crime capital of the world? And simply because of the "abundance" of guns? And that the main character was "poisoned" by her father because he was a gun fan?

I'm sure the other reviewers are right, I'm just too unsophisticated to "get it." However, for the American audience, this book completely tanked. I picked it up for one dollar at our local convenience store. Sure, it didn't cost much, but the time invested reading it could have been used a lot better.

Virtually real.......2002-06-19

I picked this up by chance at a bookstore, never heard of the author prior. I was about 50 pages in when I recalled I had originally found it in the SF section. Where was the science fiction part of the story? This was starting out as just a good novel, cleanly written, with a great eye for insignificant detail that helps flesh out the tale. Having read SF throughout most of my reading career, I know most of it is plot driven with characters and settings just used to push along the nifty story. This book takes its time (luxuriates?) developing the main character, Teresa Simons, a real woman who adapts within character to the unfolding events. Its done so well I assumed the author was a woman. (He's not). She has grown up in England, the daughter of a career US military man,becomes an FBI agent, and one day loses her husband in a random spree massacre.

This is the kind of SF I need now and then, maybe the best kind; where the whole story isn't techy, there is just one added element/theme to a time that could otherwise be today, ExEx. (Extreme Experience, virtual reality on steroids.) The story takes a very pleasant ramble through Teresa's' life, and from time to time she does an ExEx scenario, first for FBI training and later through a commercial provider. The iterative process she goes through to improve her performance is the most interesting of the whole book. I want this in my life for home, work and social situations. It's like the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray, where he is trapped into relieving the same day over and over again, until he eventually he gets it right. How cool would that be??
The rich, lush detail of the novel echoes the supposed detail Teresa finds in the hyper-real VR scenarios. Eventually the plot becomes complicated as she enters an ExEx scenario during which she enters an ExEx scenario....and so on. It's like looking into two mirrors reflecting each other.

There were a couple of loose ends that didn't hit me until a few days after finishing. What happened to Nick and Amy, the folks who run the hotel? They just disappear from one page to the next after they sell their stories. Also, what is up with the execs from GunHo corp? They make a big splashy extrance and then they too exit stage right. I'm sure its all in here, I'm just too used to obvious plot points. Oh well, I'll pay more attention when I read it again.

So here's the question you'll have to solve: Does the whole story take place inside an ExEx, or does she only choose at the end to avoid "real" reality without her dead husband by staying permanently in a scenario?

Many books compell me to race through them to see what happens next. This made me keep coming back to enjoy spending a little more time with Teresa.

An okay not-quite-finished book . . ........2002-04-22

This is a rather frustrating book -- generally well written, filled with interesting ideas, but sometimes inconsistent and sometimes simply unbelievable. Teresa Simmons and her husband are trained FBI field agents in what seems to be our present, except that both were trained with the help of an extremely sophisticated virtual reality system that put them into various roles in a wide range of historically-based "killer" scenarios. Through repeated insertions into each scenario, they had to learn to react appropriately and to survive the situation. (The process seems extremely wasteful of personnel, not to mention impossibly expensive.) Anyway, her husband is killed in the line of duty in a small Texas town and Teresa, trying to cope with her loss, discovers a similar mass killing took place at the same time on the same day in a small town in the south of England. So, naturally, she goes off to Sussex to look around. (Huh?) Then she begins patronizing the local virtual reality provider and discovers a whole new kind of "shareware" virtual experience. (If she's so well trained and informed, why had she never heard of this before?) The overlap between the incidents in Texas and England become more pronounced and Teresa's virtual experiences become more complicated, until everything comes to a head in a scenario within a scenario . . . sort of. The problem is, Priest assumes that a woman experiencing a man's role in virtual reality -- including sexual activity -- won't react any differently than she had as her own self. This seems extremely unlikely. And he has a very shaky grasp of what West Texas is like, even though he was previously married to Texan author Lisa Tuttle. And nothing is ever really resolved. It's like he was three-quarters of the way through writing and re-writing the book, and just stopped.

My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World

Average customer rating:

Do not buy.
Virtuality: The New World
"Laurel" speaks
Okay, it's biased, but who cares?
Cyber sociology

My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World
Julian Dibbell
Manufacturer: Owl Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0805036261

Amazon.com

This is the story of one user's experience at a virtual-reality community called LambdaMOO. A MOO--short for multiuser dungeon, object oriented--is a virtual place where participants can construct human-like graphical representations of themselves to interact in a simulated world. Author Julian Dibbell begins by relating the facts surrounding the case of Mr. Bungle, a character who committed the crime of "virtual rape" in this fantastic electronic world, shocking LambdaMOO's members. However, the thread of discussion about this case is minimal and the book ultimately becomes Dibbell's diary of his "research" of this virtual world, which grows gradually more obsessive, and how it affects his RL (real life).

Dibbell offers glimpses of his RL between rich, colorful, and entertaining chapters describing the online community's gossip, his interactions and relationships with the other members, and his first experience with cybersex. What is interesting is that the brief snatches of RL are bland and boring, written in a kind of script format with little more than stage directions for descriptions. This device, plus Dibbell's discussions of his dreams about the MOO, show the reader how deeply involved Dibbell becomes in this community. The turning point comes when Dibbell's membership at LambdaMOO threatens to ruin one of his closest RL relationships. --Cristina Vaamonde

Book Description

Being a true account of the infamous Mr. Bungle and of the author's journey, in consequence thereof, to the heart of a half-real world called LambdaMoo.

From In Cold Blood to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, readers have been gripped by the novelistic rering of eccentric communities torn apart by violent crime.

Julian Dibbell's reporting of the "Mr. Bungle" rape case first appeared as the cover story in The Village Voice. Since that time it has become a cause célèbre, cited as a landmark case in numerous books and articles and a source of less discussion on the Internet. That's because the scene of the crime was a "Multi-User Domain," an electronic "salon" where Internet junkies have created their own interactive fantasy realm. In a "place" where race, ger, and identity are infinitely malleable, the addictive denizens had thought they'd escaped all traditional cultural and moral limits. Yet Mr. Bungle's primal transgression challenged all their illusions, confronting even this electronic utopia with the same issues of order and social norms that humanity has faced since the Stone Age. When this fantasy imbroglio threatens Dibbell's actual marriage, we see how the virtual world at once mirrors and mocks real life.

Customer Reviews:

Do not buy........2006-05-22

Pretentious, meandering, and bereft of anything that could be mistaken for value. I question its use even as a cautionary tale of a man who has lost all ability to distinguish between the real world and a world of pretend.

Virtuality: The New World.......2001-03-10

The author presents a tour of cyberspace. During this journey, we learn how the author feels, and what their priorities are. Cyber communites are the logical extension of chat sites, and web/ mail exchanges. In the real world, where restrictions can be placed on our daily lives, virtual reality provides an escape. Exploring this venue, we can learn more about ourselves as we interact with others, and the new environment. I'm glad the author documented their experiences!

"Laurel" speaks.......2000-01-20

I was the character that Dibbell called "Laurel" in his book. I was "there" though the entire story he describes, reading what he read in real time, although I never "spoke" with him (on-line or off). His book is remarkably accurate, although he does not have all the facts straight of the people behind the LambdaMOO characters. He deserves a lot of credit -- he got it closer than anyone else possibly could have.

Okay, it's biased, but who cares?.......1999-12-28

I found this book compulsively readable. I was a regular on LambdaMOO at around the same time that Dibbell was, and I found his descriptions of the experience of MOO-ing (what it's like to be there and participate in various ways) quite accurate. As for his version of MOO history, I wouldn't take it too seriously, but then, he makes it pretty clear that the motivations behind and significance of the events that he recounts are disputed. What impresses me about this book is the way it captures the feeling of being in the MOO, and the analysis of the issues that got raised in various conflicts.

Cyber sociology.......1999-12-16

Aside from his own personal, short-term journeys in and out of LambdaMOO and fairly mundane conflict and resolution with his significant other, which provide part of the hook to the reader, Dibbell writes in an engaging way about the sociology of the MOO community. Of particular interest are the immediate and long term reactions of the community to acts, virtual though they may be, that affect the fabric of the MOO society. The book's inability to fully demonstrate the complexity of the MOO society, demonstrated by MOOers' castigation of the work, is irrelevant to the points made by the author about the relationships of the wizard power class to the other, parallel MOO societies, and to the constituent class. The strong reactions of members of the MOO society to events and characters that are perceived as harmful elements, and the attempts to call for, impose and/or resist virtual law and order in an unruly and perhaps ungovernable society provide the real conflict. Dibbell's observations of the tensions of anarchy and order in the MOO unfold in counterpoint to the author's RL events and relationships, which are described in MOOspeak, but which must inevitably follow societal rules and expectations of long standing.

I found it to be a page-turner well after the narration of the motivating event was finished.

Average customer rating:

Imaginatve and creative

Excellent read!

A real page-turner!

Suspense, Humor and Virtual Reality

Virtual Murder
Jennifer Macaire
Manufacturer: Loose Id, LLC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Slave to Sensation (The Psy-Changelings, Book 1)

The Prendarian Chronicles

ASIN: 1596321520

Book Description

Virtual Murder - A dream cyber-vacation turns into a virtual nightmare when a handsome young tour guide ends up dead. But who--or what--can kill from within a computer program? A World Between - While troubleshooting an exciting new virtual spy game, June Houston discovers a doorway into another world, one filled with love and hope. Someone else has discovered the same doorway; someone who will stop at nothing to control the world between dreams and reality. When lust and violence haunt the Net, it's Virtual Murder.

Customer Reviews:

Imaginatve and creative.......2004-09-01

Jennifer Macaire has created an amazing story line in "Virtual Murder." On top of that, she's populated it with some excellent characters (I loved Monkey) and humor. While she gets into the story in the first few pages, the story slows down a bit for the next several. But once it picks up again, it never slows after that. If I have one regret about the novel it's that I wanted more of the characters and more depth to the subplots. I wanted more of the world she created for me. Still, it's a compelling story superbly written, and it might give you a few chills about the future because it seems just a little too plausible to ignore.

Excellent read!.......2004-04-06

"Virtual Tours" was perfect for people too busy for vacations. All one had to do was book a vacation at the company, Virtual Tours. The clients were hooked up, went into a sleep-like state, and had a two week vacation in the Bahamas. However, in reality, the clients' bodies were at rest only three days. Everything was realistic. They could even purchase gifts on the vacation for people back home. Only one thing was different, no one could be aroused to desire or lust. Net Government wanted to make sure that no one could use the Net for sexual gains. "Those" types of sites were wiped out back in the year 2010. What the public never knew was that nineteen mutants created it all. Half human and half machine, these nineteen beings floated in their large glass tubes and created virtual world after virtual world.

But when tour guides began to die things went bad! Net Security claimed it was only a virus or bug in the program. Andrea Girt, who began Virtual Tours and ran it, was sure that it was murder. Andrea was convinced that someone, somehow, had slipped into Virtual Tours' virtual world and murdered them.

One mutant was chosen, M-18, to be taken out of his glass home. M-18 was nicknamed Monkey. Everyone hoped that Monkey could find and catch the killer or virus. After all, Monkey created that particular world and no one knew the virtual worlds better than the mutants.

(...)An incredible sci-fi tale that kept me glued all night long! (...) If this book was made into a movie or television series it would be an instant hit. Recommended to readers who love to game online especially! (...)

Reviewed by Detra Fitch of Huntress Reviews.

A real page-turner!.......2003-08-14

It was a dream vacation in the Caribbean. Blue sky, crystal-pure beaches, an azure ocean, hunky tour guides, exquisite flora and fauna...and being copulated to death. What a way to go! Unfortunately, and unlike the Virtual Vacation's Caribbean package, death was the real deal.

Someone was killing Virtual Vacation's tour guides with sex. But copulation wasn't allowed on the net. How could this be happening? Enter the mutants. Yes, mutants.

Perhaps some background is needed. Years ago test-tube human ova were grown, grafted to direct computer-interface technology. "Cyborg" leaps immediately to mind, in the same vein of Robo-Cop. Except that these mutants look nothing like Robo. 100% better...or worse, depending on which mutant you are looking at. Raised in transparent, gas-filled tube-shaped containers, these children-now-adults have never experienced the outside world, existing only through their interface with the World Wide Web. While performing many tasks, they exist for one purpose only: to obey commands given to them by their programmers. (Autistic ones that can bend time? Kewl!) M-18, known as Monkey, was given the order to create a virtual world, where folks could go "on vacation" without ever leaving their hometown. Great idea! Sign me up!

Due to some Big Brother Law, sexual congress during these trips is "repressed. (Note: that would make a serious crimp in my vacation plans.) Murder was definitely disallowed! So who was killing Virtual Vacation's cast members with sex? How could a program created, implemented, and maintained by a cyborg/mutant be hacked by human technology? Or has something more sinister and more feral grown to fruition on the World Wide Web?

Virtual Murder may take a few moments to kick in, due to just a tad bit too many descriptions, but when it does...look out! A real page-turner. I sat down telling myself, "The first fifty pages only." I ended at page one hundred, when fatigue and blurred vision kept me from being able to resolve the text. This is a cyber-thriller the likes of which hasn't been seen on the shelves since the 60s and the 70s, when the elder masters of the genre retired. For folks who like a bit of romance with their mystery, and who like more than a bit of science with their fiction, Virtual Murder is not to be missed. A fabulous read!

-Brenda Thatcher

Suspense, Humor and Virtual Reality.......2003-07-16

Wealthy Andrea Girt runs Virtual Tours, a virtual reality vacation company that allows its customers to experience a 2 week vacation in only 2 days. Handy, huh? The program is supposed to be safe--customers pay enough for it to be safe--but someone inside the program, somewhere, murders one of Andrea's tour guides using sex.

Yet neither sex nor murder is supposed to be possible inside this program!

Andrea's investigations, as well as the investigations of the "Net Government", lead to a super secret facility containing beings who aren't supposed to exist--tanked mutants capable of surfing the "Net" who helped create Virtual Tours. And one of those mutants, Monkey, may know more than he's telling. Either way, they've got to let him out of his tank to find out.

Virtual Murder has several plotlines and several protagonists, most of whom will hold your interest and make you wish the whole book was about them. From the secretary at the secret lab to the programmer at Andrea's company to Monkey himself, these characters adrift in this conspiracy...or something...struggle to understand it before someone else is killed. They will compel you to keep reading. The story exists in the realms of the imagination, without a lot of hardware gunk to weight it down, and turns on the strength of its characters, not the exploration of computers or virtual reality itself.

At times freaky and at times very human, Virtual Tours should please fans of cyber science fiction romance and futuristic suspense.

ETA: This has been re-released in ebook and paper form from a place called Loose ID, I think. Worth tracking down!

Average customer rating:

GREAT SUMMER READ!
Adventure into the future

Better Than Chocolate
Bruce Golden
Manufacturer: Zumaya Otherworlds
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1934135461

Book Description

Hunting down his partner's killer and investigating a pair of seemingly unrelated murders, SF Police Inspector Noah Dane stumbles onto a conspiracy that threatens all humanity. Chastity Blume, a celebrated talk show host known as "America's Favorite Virgin" discovers the sinister plot while searching for the mother she never knew. Along with Noah's new crime-fighting partner-a Marilyn Monroe celebudroid-they lead a cast of quirky characters towards a climax of comically sexy proportions, where all the clues point to an insanely popular new virtual reality experience that's "Better Than Chocolate."

Customer Reviews:

GREAT SUMMER READ!.......2007-08-03

If you could cross Mickey Spillane and Robert Heinlein you'd probably get a book with something close to the quick witted, hard-hitting characters moving across its bizzaro future-scape.

The lead character, Noah Dane, fits the mold of the typical detective novel hero with enough of a Heinlein-esque quirkiness to make the whacky vision of the future seem not only plausible, but too comical not to be real. Dane moves through a technologically transformed San Francisco of a not too distant future that comes to life through what seemed like thousands of novel devices and fresh witticisms. It takes a few short, jam-packed chapters to set the stage, but once I was into the meat of the story it was hard not to want to know what mutant-street urchin or sexually charged android would appear next, and what they would do--to who.

From the whimsically well-fleshed dystopia to its endearingly comical showdown, this book is just what the title says it is. Every page demanded louder to be turned until the last one put me to bed with a smile on my face.

Adventure into the future.......2007-08-02

This book is truly a sexy satire using futuristic police procedures and robots to tell the story of Noah Dane. When Noah's partner is killed and the killer is the only one from the Blue Scoprs to escape his 50 caliber Desert Eagle XIX, Noah is hot on his trail. With his new partner, a robot that is a clone of Marilyn Monroe, he searches the mean streets of the San Francisco.

Bruce Golden's skill as a satirist, his imaginative depiction of the future in our law enforcement departments, and his vivid characters, intertwined with the everyday personal problems that the reader can relate to, makes for an entertaining tale.

Review by Wanda C. Keesey

Average customer rating:

Good Beach Reading
Munn's World
Urban noir, semi-cyberpunk, and very good writing
A very poorly written book
Excellent Book

SHIFT, THE (Bantam Spectra Book)
George Foy
Manufacturer: Spectra
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 055337544X
Release Date: 1996-06-01

Book Description

Alex Munn works in Manhattan's "Television City" as head writer for an ordinary soap opera. But when his TV bosses decide to use brand-new virtual reality technology to produce the most involving drama series ever, Munn signs on to revolutionize the TV industry. In his spare time, though, he creates another virtual world: "Munn's World." It's set in gaslit 1850s New York City, where a vicious serial killer called the Fishman is disemboweling victims in the Bowery. But now, something has gone terribly wrong. It's unscripted, it's terrifying, but the Fishman has somehow escaped from Munn's World--and followed Alex into the present.

Customer Reviews:

Good Beach Reading.......2004-04-13

I am convinced that amid the dusty shelves of my local used book store, there are hidden gems. SF books that, for one reason or another, have been overlooked by fans and therefore a good read can be picked up on the cheap.

I picked up "The Shift" for less than three dollars, which seems a fair price for this murder-mystery-SF hybrid (more mystery than SF, I'm afraid).

Other than the already-mentioned-in-other-reviews cheesy cover, bad title and clunky first chapter, I think the biggest problem with this book is that it feels dated. No one's writing VR books anymore, for good reason.

But the references to mid-90's pop culture icons of Oliver North, Tonya Harding and Oksana Baiul seem weirdly out of date. Are cellphones really that unusual in the future?

The narrative moves along swiftly sometimes, but also gets bogged down mid-novel, as if even the author wasn't sure where this was all going. And perhaps there are a few too many shocking revelations in the last 50 pages (or at least, revelations that are poorly telegraphed).

I don't want to sound too negative, though. Given the competition in SF books these days, one could certainly do a lot worse. The worlds shown are well-realized (the 1850's world especially so), the characters are interesting, and I think overall, the book would make fine beach-reading.

Munn's World.......2003-03-08

"The Shift" has three immediate strikes against it. First off, the title is wrong, and has little to do with the book (It should have been called "Munn's World.") Second, the cover art is embarrassingly bad, and screams cheap and pandering with every airbrushed inch. It is the kind of cover and title you don't want people to see you holding on your lunch break. Third, the first chapter is so awful that it seems like it was written by a different author. It is cheap and pandering, just like the cover leads you to expect. In short, the very things that are supposed to hook you into a new book, repulse you instead. I can imagine more than one person picking this book up, shaking their head at the cover, then setting it back on the shelf after a glance at the first chapter.

If you can make it past these three considerable barricades, however, you are in for a completely unexpected treat. This is a good book! The writing style is excellent, and the writer does an amazing job of bringing to life two such disparate worlds, that of his cyberpunk pseudo-future and the VR historical world of 1800's New York. Both worlds are fully fleshed out, with a detail that surprises even the characters in the book. The characters are also complete, although Alex Munn tends to be the single loud voice in the book. His supporting characters are equally interesting, and well researched. The punk-obsessed Zeng is accurate, although there are a few minor flaws (Sid Vicious did not sing "God Save the Queen." Johnny Rotten did.) The mysterious villain, The Fishman, is a nice boogie man to chase Munn down his various roads.

Altogether, a book worth the time. Some good ideas and good writing, with an unusually successful blending of science fiction and historical fiction. I would love to see "The Shift" reissued with a different title and cover. Don't give up after the first chapter!

Urban noir, semi-cyberpunk, and very good writing.......2002-05-15

Alex Munn is a sort-of-television producer for X-Corp., a Hong-Kong-financed major player in New York of a few years from now. Through unprecedented computer power, X-Corp. has developed an extremely lifelike virtual reality system, user access to which ranges from ordinary 2D television to immersion of the consumer and wide control of the story's development, depending on how much the consumer wants to spend. Alex considers himself an artist and he hasn't much use for "Real Life," the sappy product he's being paid to develop, but it's hard to give up the money -- though he's already lost his wife, a soap actress on one of his earlier projects. Alex has been working quietly on a much better application of the VR technology: "Munn's World," set in the New York of 1850. Where "Real Life" ignores plot in favor of showing off the technology, "Munn's World" is gritty and involving . . . and almost too real, for a Nativist killer who stalks the old city, butchering the hated Irish, seems to have edged over into the "real" New York. Foy is extremely knowledgeable about his city of the present and the past (or else he's really, really good at faking it), and he has a serious gift for characterization, intricate plotting, and descriptive writing generally -- and a teriffic ear for Nooyawkese. He puts you inside the protagonist, especially, and his take on Riker's Island is terrifying and unforgettable. I don't know how I managed to miss hearing about this when it came out, but I'm glad I found it!

A very poorly written book.......1999-10-13

The "Author's Note" irritated me (check out the first and last sentences) and the first paragraph of the book irritated me even more. This goes beyond writing style or inventive wordplay ala Riddley Walker or Feersum Endjinn - Foy seems oblivious to the basic rules of grammar. After reading the first page I flipped through at random and it didn't get any better. This book got thrown across the room, then picked up and put in the bin. However judging by some of the other write-ups it contains some very good ideas. So read the first page - if this doesn't bug the **** out of you maybe you'll enjoy it.

Excellent Book.......1999-08-28

This book is one of the best I have ever read. The plot grabs you and brings you into the life of Alexander Munn. I definatly suggest anyone who likes the cyberpunk genre, read this book. You will not be dissapointed.

Average customer rating:

Virtual Murder
Amanda Gray
Manufacturer: PublishAmerica
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1413781071

Book Description

In the locked homes of the wealthy and famous, someone is murdering the headline makers of the future. The bodies of the “Beautiful People” are mutilated, organs removed and missing, and silent messages left for investigators. Lieutenant Christina McCray, assistant head of the Homicide Division, uses all the resources of her local police force to try and solve the mysteries before the monster strikes again. With the help of her partners, friends and a vampiric ex-lover, she races against time to offset what threatens to become a war between humans and an ancient alien species.

Average customer rating:

Virtual Silence
Joan Schweighardt
Manufacturer: Permanent Press (NY)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Average customer rating:

The Virtual Murder Mystery Series
Creative Multimedia
Manufacturer: Creative MultiMedia Corp
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio CD

General | Books on CD | Audiobooks | Formats | Books
ASIN: 1880428261

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