"Great SF mystery"

When the computer programmers made artificial intelligence personalities (AIP), nobody expected one of them, Turing Hopper, to gain sentience or to make friends with humans. Her biggest concern of the moment is finding her clone T-2 stolen by Nestor Garcia, a criminal who wants to use her intelligence in planning his career. Turing's friend private investigator Tim Pinesoki is hired by Mrs Stallman to investigate her grandson's business. He was the victim of a hit and run driver; a witness thinks the driver was trying to murder Edward.

Mrs. Stallman thinks that the attempted murder was linked to his web hosting business and to the friends her grandson let use free space on his server for their website. To get her mind off her problems, Turing decides to help Tim as does her friend Maude Graham who is the front person for Turing's businesses. It takes them a long time to get inside because they don't have the user name or password but when they do get in, they realize someone is running illegal porn sites and someone else is using phiset spams to collect credit card and banking information. When the neighbor who saw the hit and run is murdered, Turing and company realize they are dealing will a very dangerous individual who will not hesitate to kill anyone who gets too close to uncovering the truth.

For an AIP, Turing Hopper has more personality then most humans do and her quest to understand carbon based entities is something a sentient AI would do. Luckily, she is a decent silicon based entity who only bends the law to prevent her sentience from being discovered. The mystery is constructed with a variety of suspects; many of whom committed criminal acts but only one went so far as murder. Donna Andrews has written another great amateur sleuth who-done-it.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted October 17, 2005

Summary

After a hit-and-run leaves a young techie named Eddie in the hospital, Turing, an almost-sentient computer, tries to help her PI friend Tim find out who did it. While Turing tries to break into Eddie's computers, her human friends do the legwork. It seems Eddie lets his seedy friends use his computers-and some are running highly unsavory websites. Others are using spam to con people out of their credit card numbers. Then the feds show up, looking for an online vigilante who's also using Eddie's computers. Now Turing and her friends are caught in the middle. They can't let the vigilante continue-but they also can't tell the FBI everything without revealing Turing's identity to the world.