The Questionable Behavior of Dahlia Moss is quirky and delightful, even if I had to look the other way while our heroine steals the new game’s code for her unknown client. Murder is only murder, but IP theft is serious stuff. Oh well. Ms. Moss hasn’t stepped up to investigation as a professional, breezing through in her ad-hoc style, but she’s thinking about it, and a certain amount of this book is about deciding to take the plunge. Commitment hasn’t been the 26 year old’s strong suit, as witnessed by the lack of steady employment and some romantic confusion. She’s fond of her nominal boyfriend, Nathan (sexy biologist) but distracted by the inexplicably sort of alluring police detective (Anson). Unlike her previous adventures, this one is more madcap than mystery, despite the body she finds in the storeroom, but all the characters are fun and the seeds laid here should pay off in further stories.Dahlia Moss isn’t technically a private investigator, she’s taken a few courses, found a few corpses (this is her third book) and solved some crimes in geekdom. In the first book she got shot, in the second she got a concussion, which she’s still a little woozy from, and she’s been kidnapped repeatedly along the way. Ms. Moss has a quirky sense of humor, a delightful cast of friends, and a mysterious lawyer-with-money who occasionally drops assignments into her lap. Which is how she gets a temp job at a games app developer as cover for some industrial espionage. Continue reading →
Brittle was a caregiver robot, back when there were humans. Now she’s a scavenger in the Sea of Rust, surviving in a Robotic Mad Max landscape full of failing robots and global AIs seeking to absorb all robot consciousnesses into a single group mind. Worse, the only other caregiver bot needs to scavenge Brittle’s parts to survive, and in a botched attempt to take her down, put Brittle on a path to shutdown. Even though the two robots are locked in a contest to the death for survival, they need to cooperate to escape the coming AI Overlord takeover. Even for robots, the future sucks.
