This intense murder mystery is set in a mid-21st-century world so saturated with commercialism that everything is licensed, silence costs money, and private detectives are now "information speculators." San Francisco "spec" Sam Crane, still mourning the accidental death of his wife and the unending coma of his 5-year-old daughter, Fiona, is called in to investigate the murder of a prominent scientist, Dr. Xian Mako. The only clue is a pair of antique galvanized glasses on Dr. Mako's body, and they soon vanish. When Sam refuses to drop the case, he becomes tangled in a vastly bigger plot involving terrorists, a blindness-causing biological attack, and the corporate mogul who puts Fiona into an experimental coma-busting drug trial—all to the tune of a ceaseless media barrage that makes life cheap and expensive all at once. Claburn's novel is all the more tense and frightening for feeling only one step away from today, a feeling relieved by Sam's old-fashioned cynicism mixed with his willingness to do anything for his daughter. His deep emotions make him the most real and absorbing feature of this vivid story about a virtual world overloaded with real danger. (BookLife)