The Mocking Program

Inspector Angel Cardenas has seen murdered corpses like George Anderson's, but never a case like this. The victim's ID doesn't match his DNA, Anderson's wife and preteen daughter, Katla, are missing, their home has been turned into a time bomb-and mobs from three continents are all hunting Katla. Relying on his training as a nearly telepathic intuit, Cardenas embarks on a search for clues that leads him from the Strip's sex parlors and stimstick clubs, where kids are deadly and music can kill, to an undersea hideout where computer crimes are committed by criminal computers. Yet the closer Cardenas gets to the girl, the closer assassins are getting to them both...From Publishers WeeklyBestseller Foster (The Dig; Interlopers; etc.) elevates this well-paced, hard-boiled SF police procedural through the use of a highly imaginative setting the sprawling Montezuma Strip, which stretches along the old U.S.-Mexican border and constitutes "the western hemisphere's largest concentration of industry, commerce, assemblage, cutting-edge technology, and trouble." When police inspector Angel Cardenas investigates the case of a male corpse found with most of its internal organs missing ("They'd left the heart. Not much of a demand for hearts these days. Not with good, cheap artificial models flooding the market"), the victim turns out to have had two identities one as a local executive, the other as a Texas businessman. The plot thickens when the victim's booby-trapped house nearly kills Cardenas and his partner. After a few more near escapes, they establish that the corpse's "wife and daughter" are actually Surtsey and Katla Mockerkin, the ex-wife and 12-year-old daughter of crime lord Cleator Mockerkin, who wants them back in (literally) the worst way. By now Cardenas is sufficiently determined to follow them to Central America, aided by his training as an almost telepathic intuit. The amazingly versatile author plays with a full deck of futuristic elements notably, sapient apes led by gorillas and intelligent rogue computers that commit computer crimes. An ambiguous but nonetheless satisfying ending leaves open the possibility of another story about Inspector Cardenas. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalProlific author of perennial best sellers (e.g., The Dig), Foster offers an entertaining cross between the police procedural and sf genres. Angel Cardenas of the Namerican States Federales is a police inspector whose beat is the Strip, a megalopolis that encompasses Mexico and part of what used to be the United States. A routine investigation of what appears to be a mugging death soon leads to something unlike anything Cardenas has ever encountered, and he needs all of his considerable skills to track down the body and penetrate the wake of death that surrounds the victim's wife, Surtsey, and her daughter, Katla. Several parties are criminally intent on harming the women; Cardenas wants to find out why and how to protect them. Cardenas is an appealing character, and his antagonists are as colorful as they are imaginatively deadly. The only stiff character is 12-year-old Katla, who, even accounting for her renowned precociousness, comes across flat. But Foster makes up for that with a richly envisioned future of high-tech urban sprawl that calls to mind a less dystopian Blade Runner. For general fiction and sf collections.- Devon Thomas, Hass MS&L, Ann Arbor, MI Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.