RUTH RUN

Readers are asked to root for an unrepentant thief in this first novel, a jokey cybercrime thriller.

Ruth, a hacker of microchips, would say that she isn’t the worst kind of thief: “I skimmed chump change from banks. Are you really going to side with a bank?” Mike, formerly a salesman who worked with Ruth and now a clock puncher for what he calls “the Agency,” has spent seven years on Ruth’s trail. At some point during the car chase that brings Ruth and her nearly 3 pounds of stolen cash from Northern California to Nevada and beyond, she learns that she’s being framed in the double murder of her coding assistant and his boyfriend. Ruth and Mike’s cat-and-mouse act has an odd, couplelike tetchiness: Ruth considers Mike “a self-important jerk” and “a government flunky”; Mike sees Ruth as “an almost pathologically nonconformist spirit” who “dressed badly” and who, for all the good trying to elude him will do her, “might as well have tried to hide from the sky.” Cat and mouse take turns narrating this cunning and constantly surprising novel, giving readers a passenger-seat view from which to witness each adversary’s missteps and monitor their weaknesses. (Ruth’s kryptonite: food and the dog she picks up on the road. Mike’s kryptonite: Ruth.) Luddite readers will miss some of the novel’s finer points, but underneath all its talk of microchips, databases, and firewalls is a character-fueled story in which a bit of heart occasionally seeps out from between the cracks in Ruth’s armor, or at least tries to: “I reminded myself that life was about more than money; what money could buy also mattered.”

No tech expertise required to enjoy this diverting and funny-as-hell cyber caper.