Review of THE MOCKING PROGRAM by Alan Dean Foster

ASPECT, Warner Books, August 2002

It's just another corpse--murdered, stripped of valuable organs and blood, and left to rot. Except Inspector Angel Cardenas suspects something more. The corpse is too well dressed for his neighborhood. When a deep scan reveals the impossible--multiple identities, Cardenas sets off on a hunt for a murderer who has amassed a criminal empire in a near-future North America. As assassins close in on the wife and daughter of a gangster leader, Cardenas wrestles with keeping them alive--and to get a grip on why anyone would want to kill them so desperately.

Classic S.F. author Alan Dean Foster (see more BooksForABuck.com reviews of novels by this author) delivers a taunt near-future mystery. The politics, economics, slang, and science in THE MOCKING PROGRAM are logical extensions from today's world grounding the novel and making it approachable. Cardenas is both sympathetic and heroic, his empathic abilities adding rather than detracting from his essential humanity.

Foster's writing engages the reader, keeps the pages turning, and asks questions about the nature of life and probes the nature of the relationship between man and machine.

Very nice.

Four Stars

Reviewed 10/08/02

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