The Doomsday Brunette
John Zakour & Lawrence Ganem
Daw, Feb 2004, $6.99, 368 pp.
ISBN 0756400902

The only freelance private detective in the year 2058 has HARV, the world's most advanced artificial intelligent super computer hardwired into his brain. At times Zachary Nixon Johnson does not know when his thoughts end and HARV's begins but he knows it is the computer in his head that is waking him up to take a call from a client at three o'clock in the morning.

Ona Thompson of the famous Thompson quads, genetically engineered to be powerful, invulnerable and unbelievably intelligent, wants Zach at her estates post haste because she has a problem and nobody says no to Ona. When he (and HARV) arrives, they find three live Thompson Quads and one dead one. Since it is widely known that the sisters all hate each other, Zach is hired to find the killer so Ona can be exonerated in the court of public opinion and with the police department of New San Francisco.

John Zakour & Laurence Ganem are an excellent writing team who work in the comic book industry that manifests itself in the storyline reading at times like a graphic novel without the pictures. Between the interactions of HARV and Zach and the Thomson quads, one of who is a super crime fighter and one believes she is a fairy godmother; readers will find themselves in stitches of laughter. This work of speculative fiction is first class entertainment.

Harriet Klausner