Raffel, Keith: Dot Dead

Midnight Ink © 2006, 280 pages

Ian Michaels, the number two guy at Silicon Valley's Accelenet, comes home early on a Wednesday only to be knocked unconscious by some unseen assailant. When he gets home on Thursday, the maid is lying dead on his bed. Ian is the obvious suspect: he'd never met the woman, but a surprising number of clues point to him having been romantically involved with her. Eager to clear his name, Ian makes himself unpopular with the police department by playing amateur sleuth--contacting the dead woman's family and friends, searching her computer. In the process, he finds himself half falling in love with a woman he'd only known through Post-It notes.

Compounding the stress of the police investigation are some tensions at work. Ian needs to prepare for an important board meeting: he wants to convince its members to move Accelenet in an exciting if risky new direction. His success may prompt Ian's boss and long-time friend, Silicon Valley legend Paul Berk, to finally make Ian CEO.

Dot Dead is a very good, well-constructed mystery: Raffel artfully punctuates the book with subtle clues that leave us mentally fingering a number of different suspects. After going back and forth a number of times, I did finally focus on one particular character--and I turned out to be right--but it took me a while. Near the book's end a British-drawing-room-style exposition of the case, translated to the modern living room, is perhaps slightly anticlimactic. But that's the worst criticism I can come up with. The book, Raffel's first, is a great read. I hope he has more coming.