From Amazon.com
In Artificial Reality, everything is permitted and nothing is forbidden--or so they say. Run a con game in AR, and the law does not prosecute; have sex with a virtual child persona, and the police do not interfere. But infringe on a powerful corporation's copyright and the law rushes in. And so Detective Lieutenant Doré Konstantin unhappily finds herself appointed Chief Officer of the TechnoCrime AR Division. Virtual crimes are almost impossible to solve, her two-person staff is usually assigned elsewhere, and she spends so much of her life pursuing software pirates in AR that her sanity may be in danger. Things can't get any worse.
Then she is assigned to track a cyberstalker known as "Dervish," whose virtual persona is capable of manipulating AR in unprecedented ways. Konstantin reluctantly acknowledges Dervish's victim may be right: Dervish may have done the impossible. He may have traded places with an Artificial Intelligence, letting the AI take possession of his body as his mind escapes into the cyberverse of Artificial Reality, which he can manipulate as no software, even AI, ever could--impossible manipulations that include deleting all the exits from AR, and perhaps even killing the trapped investigator, Doré Konstantin.
Dervish Is Digital is the witty, sharp-edged, hardboiled sequel to the equally exciting and stylish SF mystery Tea from an Empty Cup. --Cynthia Ward
From Publishers Weekly
British author Cadigan (Fools; Synners) returns to the provocative Artificial Reality multiverse of Tea from an Empty Cup (1998) for an equally intriguing sequel. Promoted to the dubious post of chief officer in charge of TechnoCrime, AR division, Det. Lieutenant Dor‚ Konstantin maintains her ironic view of the off-balance world of AR and the people who frequent it. Artificial Reality is a new and separate country, with rules and customs alien to the Real world ("as the screens were obliged by law to remind you before each and every session in AR, nothing was true, everything was a lie, and all of it in billable time"). While checking reports that a casino ring in AR's "low-down Hong Kong" has been brainwashing clients, Konstantin stumbles into a similar investigation by a separate police agency or so they would have her believe. Meanwhile, AR-based clothing designer Susannah Ell wants to file stalking charges against her ex-husband, Hastings Dervish. The problem, she says, is that Dervish is digital: somehow he's managed to leave his body behind and enter AR completely. In a world where reality is completely subjective, Konstantin's search for the truth takes her once again through the shifting planes of AR's consensual hallucination. Cadigan's writing is crisp and tight as ever in this brisk cyber adventure, as told through Konstantin's wry observations. Once again the author draws the reader into a strange but fully realized world whose only constant is its unflinching view of human nature. Agent, Merilee Heifetz.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
