Spyware Killer

Monday’s early morning murder in the alley between Federal and Congress Streets sets in motion the events throwing Boston’s online social network into chaos. Confident that access to their online data is secure, the victims themselves unknowingly provide the open window into their daily patterns and routines—predictable routines easily exploited by those creating the windows. Tossing the case on Detective Mai Taya’s desk, Captain Riley could not have found a more unlikely detective in Boston’s Homicide Unit—her interest and skills in the online world are nonexistent. Attempting to decipher modern-day social data reveals just how little she knows about the world contained within the flat plastic case many people consider their lifeline; to her it’s just a cell phone. However, Mai finds her old-school gumshoe techniques, although outdated, still apply. Employing her mentor taught skills, she threads clue after clue together to support her suspicions of the killer’s identity—however unfounded her BDP superiors feel they are. Looming larger than life in the background, the online social giant garnering the market share of eyeballs hides secrets far beyond mere proprietary data. A culture woven into the fabric of everyday life, the programmers working behind the social giant’s protected lab walls control more than simply how we interact, love…and even die. Unable to penetrate the tightly closed culture, Mai elicits help from a Drug Control Unit undercover officer entrenched in the social giant’s campus to obtain the heavily secured data—data she suspects holds the key. With mounting pressure from politicians and the daily headlines, Detective Taya and others in the BPD must quickly come up to speed and learn the hacker subculture as the clues lead them into this world of crackers and phreaks able to administer death remotely with a single keystroke.