June 30, 1997
Will "Cracker" Carpenter is a veteran highway robber on the information highway, earning money by compiling confidential profiles. In Kennett's (Gray Matter) second novel, however, Cracker turns his skills in a deadly direction. He hacks into a hospital's computerized operating system and murders wealthy Rowena Clark by changing the computer records of her medical status and treatment protocols. But Clark is not his real target--Cracker's planning an elaborate trap for his stepmother, Mom Elly, who, he believes, killed his father. A tough homicide cop, Leo Schultz, suspects Dr. Graham, Clark's physician, a woman who appears to be hiding something. His partner (and boss), PJ Gray, isn't so sure. PJ directs the Computerized Homicide Investigation Project, a small, under-funded unit of four in the St. Louis Police Department. She's 40, a single mother with a 12-year-old boy, and she's an expert in using virtual reality as a crime-solving tool. Leo is boorish but real, a good counterpoint to PJ's first-class cyber-brain. Another patient's medical orders are altered by computer, and the patient dies of insulin overdose. Cracker stays one step ahead of PJ, seemingly all-powerful in his ability to cause death with a keystroke. The pace crackles when PJ enters the virtual hospital-room crime scene she's developed, first as "killer" and then as "victim." Kennett capably works the hig-tech angle, but the bang in Fire Cracker fizzles because we learn so much about Cracker's past that his next moves, and ultimately the outcome, fail to surprise us.