The Mocking Program [Hardcover]

Alan Dean Foster (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 2002

Angel Cardenas is a hardworking police detective in 21st Century Los Angeles. But Cardenas is no ordinary cop - as an intuit he possesses the special talent of knowing what others will do in any given situation. When a business man is found murdered, missing his vital organs and all his money Cardenas is on the case. His investigation takes him to the victim's home, where an explosion nearly kills him. Now, he has to figure out where the woman and the young girl who have been living there have disappeared to. And why doesn't the victim's I.D. match his DNA scan? Exploring the underworlds of Los Angeles, Cardenas will stop at nothing in his search for The Mock, a stonecold killer who will do anything to get what he wants.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bestseller 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 Journal

Prolific 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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Aspect (August 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446527742
• ISBN-13: 978-0446527743
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,161,222 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alan Dean Foster's work to date includes excursions into hard science-fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He has also written numerous non-fiction articles on film, science, and scuba diving, as well as having produced the novel versions of many films, including such well-known productions as "Star Wars", the first three "Alien" films, "Alien Nation", and "The Chronicles of Riddick". Other works include scripts for talking records, radio, computer games, and the story for the first "Star Trek" movie. His novel "Shadowkeep" was the first ever book adapation of an original computer game. In addition to publication in English his work has been translated into more than fifty languages and has won awards in Spain and Russia. His novel "Cyber Way" won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first work of science-fiction ever to do so.

Foster's sometimes humorous, occasionally poignant, but always entertaining short fiction has appeared in all the major SF magazines as well as in original anthologies and several "Best of the Year" compendiums. His published oeuvre includes more than 100 books.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars FutureCop, February 9, 2003

By 

Kevin L. Nenstiel "omnivore" (Kearney, Nebraska) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mocking Program (Hardcover)

The best way to approach this novel is not as a science fiction story but as a police procedural. Alan Dean Foster, one of the unappreciated lights in the SF pantheon, has crafted a cop drama with the distinguishing characteristic of being set about a century in the future. Technology has advanced, borders have changed, demands on individuals are different â€" but human nature, including criminal nature, is the same as it ever was.

Readers should also be aware that this book appears to be the beginning of a series. Two characters are introduced with obvious intent for a later payoff that doesn't come in this novel. The point plainly is to have our hero, Inspector Angel Cardenas, owing favors to somebody in a future book. Even the characters of Cardenas and his partner, Rudy Hyaki, are plainly meant to be repeatable in the best Sherlock Holmes style.

The book is peppered with future slang so thick that there's a glossary at the back. In some books this is distracting, but because most of the slang has its roots in words we're familiar with, it only serves in this case to deepen the realism of the setting. Don't be flustered by jargon; if you need to look it up, do so, but remember, it's all part of the story.

Not everyone will like this title. There are a number of gun battles, which are likely to alienate some people who are opposed to violence, and which are painted in rather broad strokes. The ending isn't completely unsatisfying, as though Foster wasn't sure what to do with all the plot points he wound up, but it does tie up this one novel well while leaving the possibility (probability) of sequels available. Still, there is more good about this novel then bad, and curious or adventurous readers will be well rewarded.

A good read for fans of both genres, a possible benchmark for the hybrid of two genres, this book is a worthy purchase. Foster is a strong writer, and this is a strong book

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A triumph forspeculative fiction and mystery fans, August 18, 2002

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mocking Program (Hardcover)

For Police Inspector Angel Cardenas another murdered body along the Montezuma Strip is the norm as an area as industrialized as what was once the Mexican-American border always has crime. However, this time the corpse contains a few problems that are abnormal as the remains contains few organs beyond the worthless heart and the victim's DNA matches the identifications of a local executive and a Texas businessman.

Angel visits the reported home of the victim only to barely escape a bomb blast. The two female occupants, an alleged wife and daughter, are missing. Other more unsavory types also seek the adult female and the preadolescent child as they turn out to be the ex-wife and twelve-year-old daughter of a crime lord. Using classic police techniques aided by telepathic intuit abilities, Angel investigates the homicide while searching for the two vanished individuals that he believes may be the next victims.

Alan Dean Foster is the modern day Renaissance writer, as his abilities seem to have no genre boundaries. His latest tale is a tremendous futuristic police procedural science fiction novel that grips the audience from the beginning when Angel looks at the corpse until the very final twist. The story line is loaded with action, contains interwoven elements that insure the audience knows the plot occurs in a future decade, but never loses sight of the who-done-it investigation. Angel is a great protagonist, who hopefully will star in a sequel, as THE MOCKING PROGRAM is a triumph that speculative fiction and mystery fans will fully appreciate.

Harriet Klausner

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable and Competent, September 23, 2002

By 

Alan Deikman (Fremont, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mocking Program (Hardcover)

It takes a very mature author to be able to turn out a bit of work as well polished as this one is, while at the same time mixing such different ideas.

"Angel" is a detective, a civil servant, who seems like he was transported out of some Spillane type detective novel or maybe even a Gothic. But he exists in a future world, at home with the technological gadgets and hip speech of that age. And Foster creates a whole new language for this fictional era, and it all hangs together. Like Burgess' Clockwork Orange but not that mean. Most of the time you don't have to refer to the glossary to figure out what is meant because the context is so well crafted.

There's a murder mystery here that is not too hard to figure out, but twisty enough to keep the story interesting. If I had been totally surprised at the end I would have given it one more star. As it is, this is a great book to take to the beach or on an airplane flight.