A Northwoods Sunset in Promiscuous Mode
What do you do if the boss doesn’t know you’ve accepted a new consulting gig to work under cover in the Northwoods and you leave an “I’m outtahere” note for your husband and no note all for your boyfriend and then the guy who just hired you turns up murdered and there is no Plan B?
If you’re Emma Lee Devens, you put your head down and drive an old Datsun pickup into DuBois, Wisconsin, determined to get to the bottom of the computer crime that you’ve been hired to solve. You realize the Northwoods aren’t the sylvan retreat you wanted, and you look over your shoulder for the bad guys while snooping around the office in the middle of the night, and trying to get the lay of the land by lunching with “the girls” at the Coffee Pot Café, bass fishing with the bigwigs, and drinking with the locals at Nub’s Pub. You adopt a stray cat because you’re lonely.
The stress level skyrockets when your husband and boyfriend turn up importuning you on alternate weekends, a bad guy kidnaps the cat, and another body drops. You ramp up your powers of analysis and deduction to solve the computer crime and to unmask the murderer. You donate the Datsun to charity and trudge home for one of many reconciliations with your impossible husband. And then you’re off again to solve another computer crime and crash into even crazier adventures in Festival Madness.
* Promiscuous mode, in computer related fields, is refers to the practice of putting a small hardware device into a setting so that it passes all traffic it receives to the computer rather than just information specifically addressed to it. In my novel, the term is meaningful on several levels.