2002 mystery, twenty-first in Muller's series about Sharon McCone,
private investigator in San Francisco. Sharon looks into the suicide
of an old friend's godson, who was working at a high-pressure internet
lifestyle magazine.
Yes, it's 2002, so the dotcom bubble is over and San Francisco is
visibly suffering, but there are still companies trying to make a go
of it, at least as far as the IPO. And they're in that idiotic "work
hard play hard" mindset: never mind that we told you to stay at work
all night, the pizza you were eating there was free!
But it's not as simple as that, and while there aren't any real
howlers the tech is clearly written from an outsider's perspective.
This is much more a story about the possibility of actionable
misdeeds, starting with the possibility of a wrongful-death suit
suggesting that the workplace and employers contributed to mental
pressure that led to the victim's suicide, but quickly moving on to a
range of activities from sharp but legal business practice to possible
fraud and murder.
There are many references to earlier cases, both when Sharon visits
particular locations that have been relevant before and in particular
when she contacts people met in Listen to the Silence. In the last
few books I haven't had much sense of San Francisco as a distinctive
setting rather than as The City, in part because Sharon hasn't spent
all that much time there, and since that's one of the reasons I read a
series set in a specific place I welcome its return. Altogether
there's less philosophising and more mystery-solving, and while
Muller's philosophising isn't bad it's not what I came for, so I
enjoyed this book rather more than the last one.