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Artificial Intelligence Personality Turing Hopper and her other-abled human friends search cyberspace and meatspace for the archfiend who kidnapped Turing’s clone.

Ever since stealing T2, the computer program designed to back up Turing during her reincarnation as the unseen CEO of the Alan Grace Corporation (Click Here for Murder, 2003), Nestor Garcia has escaped even Turing’s unsleeping vigilance. Now there’s a sudden lead: Somebody has used Garcia’s charge card to pay for a package delivered to a vacationing couple’s suburban Virginia address. When programmer-turned-shamus Tim Pincoski stakes out the place, he dozes off and awakens to the Fairfax County police force’s questions about the murder inside. Clearly, Tim and his older friend, secretary Maude Graham, need help. As usual, however, Turing, who’s uniquely equipped to track criminals through the endless databases in which they can’t help but leave footprints, is handicapped by her lack of corporeal identity. Not only can she not respond to the police without revealing that she’s just a computer program; she can’t even chase the deer away from Maude’s hostas (well, not at first, anyway). Sadly, Andrews’s accustomed wit (nettled by another AI personality, Turing “counted 1010 before answering”) is channeled into a chase for some pretty small fry, with Nestor Garcia just as far out of reach at the fadeout.

Will Andrews condemn one of the most cleverly conceived detectives of the decade to an endless quest for a spectral bogeyman? Stay tuned.