The Mocking Program

By Alan Dean Foster

Book Overview

The bestselling author of the Spellsinger and Flinx series delivers a suspenseful high-tech police procedural set in a gritty, near future Los Angeles.Angel Cardenas is a hard-working police detective in 21st century Los Angeles. But Cardenas is no ordinary copas an intuit he possesses the special talent of knowing what others will do in any given situation. When a businessman is found murdered, missing his vital organs and all his money, Cardenas is on the case. His investigation takes him to the victims home, where an explosion nearly kills him. Now, he has to figure out where the woman and the young girl who had been living there have disappeared to. And why doesnt the victims I.D. match his DNA scan? Exploring the underworlds of Los Angeles,Cardenas will stop at nothing in his search for The Mock, a stone-cold killer who will do anything to get what he wants.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0446527742
• ISBN13: 9780446527743
• Release Date: August 2002
• Publisher: Aspect
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.0" x 6.3"
• Age Range: 13 years and up

Customer Reviews

AI, Teenage girl/Mneumonic, Intuitive Profiler... try it.

This book keeps the pace moving. The plot keeps you guessing (though one of your guesses will likely be right). The author isn't afraid to take you into very imaginative territory. There are the wugs. Insect like AI that never harm anyone, but form a very interesting element in the plot. A teenage Jenny Mneumonic with an abusive father. A jungle of semi intelligent genetically engineered primates that are exploring their humanity (good and bad). This author isn't afraid to take you anywhere. You also get the feel that the author is teaching a little Spanish on the way (i.e. he'll use a phrase and then when it is repeated or used in some reflexive way, he'll switch in the Spanish term instead). The book leaves you a bit in the sky wondering if the ending has really landed. True, the immediate problems are solved, but there remains a mystery. I imagine a sequel to this would be very facinating. You have a teenage girl who not only has to deal with the standard wiles of fading adolescence, but whose parents were killed, has a mneumonic computer for brains, and may still be hunted by her father (who supposedly died, and may not even be real in the conventional sense). You have a inspector who has intuition better than any psychic 900 number. You have an evoloving AI network that spans nations with an unknown and unsuspected agenda. .... A lot can still happen. Read some of the pages and find out for yourself.

FutureCop

The best way to approach this novel is not as a science fiction story but as a police procedural. Alan Dean Foster, one of the unappreciated lights in the SF pantheon, has crafted a cop drama with the distinguishing characteristic of being set about a century in the future. Technology has advanced, borders have changed, demands on individuals are different â€" but human nature, including criminal nature, is the same as it ever was.Readers should also be aware that this book appears to be the beginning of a series. Two characters are introduced with obvious intent for a later payoff that doesn't come in this novel. The point plainly is to have our hero, Inspector Angel Cardenas, owing favors to somebody in a future book. Even the characters of Cardenas and his partner, Rudy Hyaki, are plainly meant to be repeatable in the best Sherlock Holmes style.The book is peppered with future slang so thick that there's a glossary at the back. In some books this is distracting, but because most of the slang has its roots in words we're familiar with, it only serves in this case to deepen the realism of the setting. Don't be flustered by jargon; if you need to look it up, do so, but remember, it's all part of the story.Not everyone will like this title. There are a number of gun battles, which are likely to alienate some people who are opposed to violence, and which are painted in rather broad strokes. The ending isn't completely unsatisfying, as though Foster wasn't sure what to do with all the plot points he wound up, but it does tie up this one novel well while leaving the possibility (probability) of sequels available. Still, there is more good about this novel then bad, and curious or adventurous readers will be well rewarded.A good read for fans of both genres, a possible benchmark for the hybrid of two genres, this book is a worthy purchase. Foster is a strong writer, and this is a strong book

Intriguing near-future mystery: a nice character in Angel

THE MOCKING PROGRAM by Alan Dean FosterASPECT, Warner Books, August 2002It's just another corpse--murdered, stripped of valuable organs and blood, and left to rot. Except Inspector Angel Cardenas suspects something more. The corpse is too well dressed for his neighborhood. When a deep scan reveals the impossible--multiple identities, Cardenas sets off on a hunt for a murderer who has amassed a criminal empire in a near-future North America. As assassins close in on the wife and daughter of a gangster leader, Cardenas wrestles with keeping them alive--and to get a grip on why anyone would want to kill them so desperately.Classic S.F. author Alan Dean Foster delivers a taunt near-future mystery. The politics, economics, slang, and science in THE MOCKING PROGRAM are logical extensions from today's world grounding the novel and making it approachable. Cardenas is both sympathetic and heroic, his empathic abilities adding rather than detracting from his essential humanity. Foster's writing engages the reader, keeps the pages turning, and asks questions about the nature of life and probes the nature of the relationship between man and machine.Very nice.

Enjoyable and Competent

It takes a very mature author to be able to turn out a bit of work as well polished as this one is, while at the same time mixing such different ideas."Angel" is a detective, a civil servant, who seems like he was transported out of some Spillane type detective novel or maybe even a Gothic. But he exists in a future world, at home with the technological gadgets and hip speech of that age. And Foster creates a whole new language for this fictional era, and it all hangs together. Like Burgess' Clockwork Orange but not that mean. Most of the time you don't have to refer to the glossary to figure out what is meant because the context is so well crafted.There's a murder mystery here that is not too hard to figure out, but twisty enough to keep the story interesting. If I had been totally surprised at the end I would have given it one more star. As it is, this is a great book to take to the beach or on an airplane flight.

A triumph forspeculative fiction and mystery fans

For Police Inspector Angel Cardenas another murdered body along the Montezuma Strip is the norm as an area as industrialized as what was once the Mexican-American border always has crime. However, this time the corpse contains a few problems that are abnormal as the remains contains few organs beyond the worthless heart and the victim's DNA matches the identifications of a local executive and a Texas businessman.Angel visits the reported home of the victim only to barely escape a bomb blast. The two female occupants, an alleged wife and daughter, are missing. Other more unsavory types also seek the adult female and the preadolescent child as they turn out to be the ex-wife and twelve-year-old daughter of a crime lord. Using classic police techniques aided by telepathic intuit abilities, Angel investigates the homicide while searching for the two vanished individuals that he believes may be the next victims.Alan Dean Foster is the modern day Renaissance writer, as his abilities seem to have no genre boundaries. His latest tale is a tremendous futuristic police procedural science fiction novel that grips the audience from the beginning when Angel looks at the corpse until the very final twist. The story line is loaded with action, contains interwoven elements that insure the audience knows the plot occurs in a future decade, but never loses sight of the who-done-it investigation. Angel is a great protagonist, who hopefully will star in a sequel, as THE MOCKING PROGRAM is a triumph that speculative fiction and mystery fans will fully appreciate.Harriet Klausner