Dervish Is Digital

Detective Lieutenant Dore Konstantin is up against it . . . and she still can't find the fabled out door.

Konstantin is Chief Officer in charge of TechnoCrime, Artificial Reality Division. In fact, she is the AR Division - unless you count her subordinates, Celestine and DiPietro. Most of the time, Konstantin doesn't count them, so she puts them on loan to auto-theft. Now, as if handling her heavy case load almost single-handed wasn't enough, she's got a stalker to deal with.

Hastings Dervish, whose so rich he lives in the Key West enclave where all legal records are sealed and the local police are bought and sold, is the stalker. At least, that's what Susannah Ell claims, and she would know. Two reasons: first, she's the one being stalked; second, she used to be married to Dervish.

Worse, Susannah says Dervish was a race traitor- to the human race, that is. He's swapped places with an ambitious AI, and now Dervish has all the processing power he needs to infiltrate every line of code in Susannah's AR design studio. And what about the AI? It's using Dervish's body as a base to visit AR, hanging out in the gambling casinos of the lowdown Hong Kong mound.

Which is where the guys from the East/West Precinct, a Japanese law-enforcement agency, come in. And specifically Goku, who often likes to go into AR in the persona of a nine-year-old kid. This really makes Konstantin unhappy but, if she going to get the goods on Hastings Dervish, she'll have to deal with Goku anyway.