AmMath, a computer software development firm headed by St. John Corbeil, employs many design engineers who are concerned with this issue. John Morrison is one of those engineers. While wandering around the company’s secure files, he runs afoul of the security agents, who quickly arrange to have him killed under circumstances that lead the police to believe that he was killed while firing on a security agent.

His sister, Lane Ward, who is also a computer genius, refuses to accept the version of her brother’s death that the company is putting out. She gets in touch with Kidd, a part time artist, part time thief and full time loyal friend of John Morrison, and enlists his help in discovering what really happened that night.

Kidd, a detester of bureaucracy, comes equipped with questionable skills acquired in his brief army career and a sometime partner and lover, LuAnn, who is a full time thief. Kidd uncovers an electronic message from John Morrison that leads with a group of their old mutual friends. Soon, Kidd is trying to find the disks that Morrison probably made, saved, and hid. He and Lane break into Morrison’s rental unit, and while in the act of finding and removing these disks, barely escape alive as the house is torched around them.

The race is on, and the sinewy conspiracy twists and turns revealing different facets of murder and blackmail, involving AmMath and the US Government in the persona of its police forces. The novel is extremely fast paced, often leaping ahead from scene to scene with little or nothing to tie the scenes together.

In addition to seeming disjointed, the text is peppered with computer user’s favorite short cut expressions. A warning to readers; if you have not advanced beyond computer games, this book will be extremely frustrating and hard for you to enjoy, however clever the plot.

About ten years ago John Sandford wrote several books about Kidd which were regarded by some being before their time. Then as now, Sandford, in constructing his stories, relied upon the reader having a fairly high threshold of computer knowledge of the reader. Indeed, the very nature of the plot in The Devil’s Code requires the use of technical terms, computer buzzwords and concepts that are familiar to computer users only.

As for the characters of Kidd and LuAnn…it is regrettable that Sandford makes so little effort to flesh out their personalities and characters. Perhaps he was relying upon the reader’s recollection of them from earlier books. However, to a new reader, they are often only instruments for advancing the plot rather than people one can come to care about.

The Devil’s Code is a bright knowledgeable electronic thriller with an incredibly high appeal to computer buffs. Conversely, it will have little appeal to those who are not.

--Thea Davis