Amazon.com Review
Linda Grant says that her latest Catherine Sayler mystery began when her real-life daughter Megan announced one night, "I'm going to Cal to play the vampire game. I might be late." Thanks to Grant's parental instincts (and her sharply-honed writing skills),
Vampire Bytes is such a perfect Polaroid snapshot of how affluent teenagers spend their time that future scholars might well wind up studying it for clues the way researchers today dig into
Chandler and
Hammett for insights into 1930s and '40s lifestyles. LARP--live action role-playing--seems like lots of fun, and its young fans certainly get more exercise than they would sitting in front of a computer screen as they act out various fantasy games. But when the games turn deadly, Sayler has to use her patented combination of pragmatic detection and feisty determination to protect the role-players. Other Sayler sorties in paperback include
Blind Trust,
Lethal Genes,
Love Nor Money, and
A Woman's Place.
--Dick Adler
From Publishers Weekly
Role-playing games (RPGs)?virtual and actual?take center stage in this perceptive sixth entry in Grant's series starring San Francisco Bay Area's technologically savvy PI Catherine Sayler (Lethal Genes, etc.). Catherine hires on with a computer gaming company to find its lead programmer, Matt Demming, who has fled and taken with him a new vampire game's source code. Before she gets very deeply into the case, the young man's body is found, drained of blood with two puncture wounds in his neck. Because Matt also played the role of a vampire in a live-action RPG taking place on the streets, the police are divided as to whether the killing is related to business (his computer and the code are still missing) or a cult. While the cops hash out their theories, egged on by a minister who has sworn to demolish all cults, Catherine agrees to help search for Chloe Dorn, the missing friend of her teenage niece. Chloe, Catherine learns, had been with Matt the evening he disappeared. E-mail, computer games and the Internet figure prominently as Grant expertly juggles the emotional and technological elements of the game players' fanciful, often terrifying world, where the lines separating fantasy and reality blur.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
