At oneof the the world's biggest corporations, a young employee is murdered.The culprit? His "prowler," or entertainment-retrievingcomputer simulation. Prowlers look like humans and go into the Internetto get stuff like tattoos and dirty magazines for their owners.

But there's also the possibility of the scenario workingbackwards. It turns out that this prowler is just milling aroundsomewhere with the young man's consciousness in tow.

A copyrightcop named McNihil is hired to fetch the prowler. McNihil isn't yourordinary, garden-variety cop. He has special cybernetic implants in hiseyes, so the world he sees is not 21st-century California, but theold-fashioned world of 1940's film noir. What follows is one of thestrangest, most phantasmogaric visions of the future literature has tooffer!

Noir has it all, with a brilliant plot, sharp Vonnegutiansatire and lush, elegant prose. It has something to appeal to the punk(slangy dialogue, walking dead people), the teenybopper (a bit ofromance) and the intellectual (all the guns are named after Wagnerianoperas: Tannhauser, Gotterdammerung, Parsifal) in all of us. Snatch up acopy at your local library today, or better yet, buy it!