Roadside Crosses

Way too long.....Finally I finished to read it! Could be a lot shorter. Without doubt the author did his research about bloggers, computer games, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games in general. In this book there is a lot of that stuff. Too many names of police ranks and consecutively too many law enforcement personages with detailed descriptions of their clothes and shoes, as if you do not have permission for yours own imagination about the physique of these people. But, actually it is not a bad thing - you are having image of characters, established by author. The book is like CSI, NCIS, Bones, Law and Order etc... all together. And at the beginning I was thinking about 4,5 stars for this book. But - no...

a very interesting novel, which doesnt only excites you but also involves you in every twists and turns :)

What is there to add - the first comment said it all!

Not nearly as exciting as my first Kathryn Dance novel "Sleeping Doll". This one explained A LOT about social networking, blogs and cyber games so I lost a bit of interest there. I may try one more Deaver though.

Here's a good review from Amazon.
Memorial crosses are being placed along roads on the Monterey Peninsula, and it quickly becomes apparent that the crosses are being placed in advance of the deaths to which they are related. Kathryn Dance and her colleagues from the California Bureau of Investigation are tasked with trying to find out who is placing the crosses, and preventing more deaths from occurring.

Local high school students are interviewed after one of their classmates narrowly escapes death. Kathryn Dance determines, using her skills in kinesic analysis, that the students know something and that they are not sharing all of their information with the police. But other facts are coming to light: on a prominent local blog called `The Chilton Report', the students are talking about Travis Brigham who was driving a car in which two classmates were killed. When Travis takes off, after the police visit him, the police are sure he is their killer.

What follows is an interesting journey through the information and disinformation in the online world. The information that people share on blogs and through other social media, and the alternate realities of those, such as Travis, who prefer the roles they can play online to those they occupy in person.

`The stories were in that blog. They have to be true, don't they?'

It becomes clear that those howling for Travis Brigham's blood are making themselves easy targets for the killer. While Kathryn Dance learns about the dangers of cyberspace (courtesy of Dr Jonathan Boling), her personal life is in turmoil as her mother is charged with the murder of a terminally ill hospital patient.

There are plenty of twists and turns in this story, and while some aspects of the delivery didn't work well for me, I found this an interesting rainy day read. It's a reminder that while danger lurks in both the virtual and actual worlds, the obvious precautions are not always enough.