Caught In the Shadows
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Becky Belski: a nice small-town girl with a nice computer research job in Chicago. Sort of.
Okay, so she's not always nice, and her "research job"--which entails digging up electronic dirt on people through computer networks--borders on the illegal. So her past is a little murky, what with her mother convicted of killing Becky's stepfather. Still--the case is closed, her mother long dead: How could a high-profile divorce case shake up her humdrum world of sweatsuits and take-out Chinese?
A wealthy socialite has shot her husband, and her lawyers have hired Becky to do some computerized snooping. A straightforward assignment, until the digging reveals a link between the victim and Becky's own half-forgotten past. The connection provides Becky with the chance to unearth the real story behind her mother's conviction.
The plot is further thickened by (1) Michael, cute-but-klutzy lawyer for the defense, and (2) Bill, Becky's long-lost stepbrother. When Becky finds herself in the odd position of being attracted to Bill, it brings a whole new meaning to the term "family affair."
Trying to sort everything out leads Becky to believe that there are some unhappy families that are unhappy in their own truly remarkable ways.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A messy divorce in the affluent suburbs of Chicago's North Shore yields a plum assignment for computer hacker Becky Belski and leads to the real mystery in this tight, intriguing tale: the redoubtable Becky's own troubled past. Working on the divorce case for an Evanston, Ill., company engaged in dubiously legal information retrieval, Becky comes across the name of a stepbrother and is suddenly preoccupied by a history she has not thought about for years. When Becky was five, her mother was convicted of murdering her stepfather; Becky was sent to Iowa, where she was soon adopted and her name changed. Becky's older stepbrothers still live nearby; the elder, cold and secretive, tells Becky her mother is dead; the younger is attracted to her. In crisp prose marked by economical humor, Haddad ( The Academic Factor ) underplays Becky's early traumas as over time her vaguely recalled past is replaced by a real one and she is required finally to be brave, rather than simply dogged and endearingly plucky.
