Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A real page-turner!, August 13, 2003
It was a dream vacation in the Caribbean. Blue sky, crystal-pure beaches, an azure ocean, hunky tour guides, exquisite flora and fauna...and being copulated to death. What a way to go! Unfortunately, and unlike the Virtual Vacation's Caribbean package, death was the real deal. Someone was killing Virtual Vacation's tour guides with sex. But copulation wasn't allowed on the net. How could this be happening? Enter the mutants. Yes, mutants. Perhaps some background is needed. Years ago test-tube human ova were grown, grafted to direct computer-interface technology. "Cyborg" leaps immediately to mind, in the same vein of Robo-Cop. Except that these mutants look nothing like Robo. 100% better...or worse, depending on which mutant you are looking at. Raised in transparent, gas-filled tube-shaped containers, these children-now-adults have never experienced the outside world, existing only through their interface with the World Wide Web. While performing many tasks, they exist for one purpose only: to obey commands given to them by their programmers. (Autistic ones that can bend time? Kewl!) M-18, known as Monkey, was given the order to create a virtual world, where folks could go "on vacation" without ever leaving their hometown. Great idea! Sign me up! Due to some Big Brother Law, sexual congress during these trips is "repressed. (Note: that would make a serious crimp in my vacation plans.) Murder was definitely disallowed! So who was killing Virtual Vacation's cast members with sex? How could a program created, implemented, and maintained by a cyborg/mutant be hacked by human technology? Or has something more sinister and more feral grown to fruition on the World Wide Web? Virtual Murder may take a few moments to kick in, due to just a tad bit too many descriptions, but when it does...look out! A real page-turner. I sat down telling myself, "The first fifty pages only." I ended at page one hundred, when fatigue and blurred vision kept me from being able to resolve the text. This is a cyber-thriller the likes of which hasn't been seen on the shelves since the 60s and the 70s, when the elder masters of the genre retired. For folks who like a bit of romance with their mystery, and who like more than a bit of science with their fiction, Virtual Murder is not to be missed. A fabulous read! -Brenda Thatcher
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent read!, April 6, 2004
"Virtual Tours" was perfect for people too busy for vacations. All one had to do was book a vacation at the company, Virtual Tours. The clients were hooked up, went into a sleep-like state, and had a two week vacation in the Bahamas. However, in reality, the clients' bodies were at rest only three days. Everything was realistic. They could even purchase gifts on the vacation for people back home. Only one thing was different, no one could be aroused to desire or lust. Net Government wanted to make sure that no one could use the Net for sexual gains. "Those" types of sites were wiped out back in the year 2010. What the public never knew was that nineteen mutants created it all. Half human and half machine, these nineteen beings floated in their large glass tubes and created virtual world after virtual world. But when tour guides began to die things went bad! Net Security claimed it was only a virus or bug in the program. Andrea Girt, who began Virtual Tours and ran it, was sure that it was murder. Andrea was convinced that someone, somehow, had slipped into Virtual Tours' virtual world and murdered them. One mutant was chosen, M-18, to be taken out of his glass home. M-18 was nicknamed Monkey. Everyone hoped that Monkey could find and catch the killer or virus. After all, Monkey created that particular world and no one knew the virtual worlds better than the mutants. (...)An incredible sci-fi tale that kept me glued all night long! (...) If this book was made into a movie or television series it would be an instant hit. Recommended to readers who love to game online especially! (...) Reviewed by Detra Fitch of Huntress Reviews.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Suspense, Humor and Virtual Reality, July 16, 2003
By A Customer
Wealthy Andrea Girt runs Virtual Tours, a virtual reality vacation company that allows its customers to experience a 2 week vacation in only 2 days. Handy, huh? The program is supposed to be safe--customers pay enough for it to be safe--but someone inside the program, somewhere, murders one of Andrea's tour guides using sex.
Yet neither sex nor murder is supposed to be possible inside this program!
Andrea's investigations, as well as the investigations of the "Net Government", lead to a super secret facility containing beings who aren't supposed to exist--tanked mutants capable of surfing the "Net" who helped create Virtual Tours. And one of those mutants, Monkey, may know more than he's telling. Either way, they've got to let him out of his tank to find out.
Virtual Murder has several plotlines and several protagonists, most of whom will hold your interest and make you wish the whole book was about them. From the secretary at the secret lab to the programmer at Andrea's company to Monkey himself, these characters adrift in this conspiracy...or something...struggle to understand it before someone else is killed. They will compel you to keep reading. The story exists in the realms of the imagination, without a lot of hardware gunk to weight it down, and turns on the strength of its characters, not the exploration of computers or virtual reality itself.
At times freaky and at times very human, Virtual Tours should please fans of cyber science fiction romance and futuristic suspense.
ETA: This has been re-released in ebook and paper form from a place called Loose ID, I think. Worth tracking down!
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