From Publishers Weekly
This sadomasochistic mystery involves Japanese businessmen, Colombian drug runners and unprincipled British journalists-all angling for computer chips, an international currency used to purchase cocaine. Georgina Powers, a London writer specializing in technology, investigates the black market trade in "drams," aka "dynamic random access memory chips." She learns that $1 million worth of drams is trading hands among several gamblers, then discovers that a Japanese chip expert has been murdered after losing the booty in a card game. Business mixes with pleasure: Georgina's lover, the stoic Shinichro Saito, is seen in the company of drug lords, while her other lover, the smiling but dangerous Pal Kuthy, has interest in the chips himself. Georgina is often beaten, raped or abducted by one or the other of these two; Saito physically punishes her for infidelity and Pal calmly fires his gun into the pillow next to her head. Computer-philes may appreciate Danks's (Frame Grabber) dweebish premise, but the misanthropic story and its cast, including hard-drinking, cigarette-puffing, pregnant Georgina, is merely sleazy.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
The reason he never met her for the Las Vegas weekend he'd invited her to, ex-colleague Charlie East explains to rolling-stone computer newshound Georgina Powers (Frame Grabber, 1993, etc.) after they've met at McCarran Airport and flown together back to Heathrow, is that he got into a high-stakes poker game he couldn't leave till he was sure of the pot: a million dollars' worth of drams, state-of-the-art computer chips. By this time Georgina has already met two of the other principals who'll figure in Charlie's oh-so-simple-sounding plan to convert the chips to cash and pay her back the œ50,000 he owes her: Hungarian gambler Pal Kuthy of AO Electronix, Charlie's potential buyer; and Shinichro Saito, Georgina's lover, who turns out to be the original seller of the chips. The only missing link is Hiroshi Sano, soon identified as the ``Al Sony'' who lost the chips to Charlie in the first place, even though he was under his company's orders to swap them for some prime Colombian blow. But the Colombians, together with the Japanese, Charlie, and Georgina, are all out of luck, because before Charlie can turn them around, the chips are hijacked from his safe-deposit box--the first of many, many reversals in this spirited round of musical drams. Instead of periodically carting in new characters, Danks just keeps peeling back more layers from her tiny cast's masks. (Those drams are not what they seem either.) The dizzying result is like a video-game version of The Big Sleep programmed by David Mamet--so incessantly brutal and funny (except to the heroine, who spends an awful lot of time getting punched out by people who call themselves her friends) that it ends up being exhausting to read. --
Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
