Click Here for Murder

By: Donna Andrews

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

Ray Santiago's friends from work know him as a brilliant-but-easygoing systems engineer who spends a lot of time on his favorite online role-playing game. But the game is over for Ray: His colleagues from work, Maude, Tim, and Turing, have just found out about Ray's murder in a dark alley.

He was shot, and his laptop stolen. It could be just another DC street crime. But if Turing's password was in that computer‚ and it's fallen into the wrong hands‚ she could be in terrible danger. With Turing's web-searching powers and Maude's and Tim's access to the outdoors, the trio starts looking into Ray's death, tracing their colleague's life from that fatal night, backspace by backspace. But this project leads to more questions than answers‚ because Ray seems to have fabricated his life story, even his name.

And now their quest is growing even more crucial. For as they sort their way through Ray Santiago's various personas, online and off, danger lurks in the lab‚ perhaps within the very computer in which Turing lives.

©2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC (P)2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC

Look out you could get hooked

This is not my area of interest. I only listen to the first one because of the author. But now I'm hooked and have to find out what will happen.

Love the series

Love the series, story and narrator. Just sorry that it wasn’t continued and that there are only two more.

Impresses as an audiobook. Amazing narration!

Turing Hopper gets a call in the middle of the night that Ray Santiago, her employee, has been murdered in Click Here for Murder by Donna Andrews. Since Turing is an artificial intelligence program (AIP), a real sentient person but a computer, not a human, she can’t investigate on her own, so she must rely on her friends, Maude and Tim. As the trio looks into Ray’s death, they are astonished to learn that he was not the real Ray Santiago, that his entire life, except for his most recent jobs in the Silicon Valley, was stolen from someone else. As they seek the truth, they find themselves immersed in the computer role playing game Beyond Paranoia, which Ray had been active in playing. Soon the team, including the new member, Claudia, gets involved in a LARP (live action role playing game) that turns out to involve much more than just a game.

This book becomes really exciting as it continues and gets listeners to continue examining questions raised in You’ve Got Murderof what it takes to be a person vs. a human. Further, in this book, we explore the world of role playing games and their live-action counterparts. When do actions within these games cross the line into being dangerous? How can we offer such games and keep out the criminal element, especially pedophiles? How much influence does the violence on the screen have on players to play out the violence in real life?

Click Here for Murder was recently released on audio, for which I am very happy. Bernadette Dunne performs the narration, and though I have always loved her work, especially her work on Donna Andrew’s more well-known Meg Langslow series, I believe she truly surpasses all the previous audiobooks I’ve heard of hers in bringing this book to life. The book’s narration switches back and forth between third person omniscient, where the narrator knows all that is going on and recounts it, and the first person narrative of Turing, the computer. In You’ve Got Murder, Turing works hard on learning how to talk like a human, but even now she still has a slightly mechanical sound to her voice. It’s obvious enough that Maude is afraid Claudia will notice during their “conference calls” with Turing, since Claudia doesn’t know the truth about Turing. Dunne brilliantly provides a credible voice for Turing, with just a hint of a mechanical tone that still is clearly different from the other voices.

I really enjoyed getting to listen to Click Here for Murder. Though this book was written almost 20 years ago, it still holds up well in its depictions of technology, and the questions it raises about the way we approach technology are just as pertinent today as they were when the book was written.

If you haven’t read the first book in the series, You’ve Got Murder, I recommend starting with that first, but it’s possible to jump in with Click Here for Murder first. I give this book five stars.

I enjoyed this addition to the series.

Donna Andrews has an incredible imagination to create the storylines for this series as well as the Meg Langslow series. Her twists always keep me quite entertained. Bernadette Dunne as always, have a stellar performance. To wrap up this review, I can’t help but mention that ending a book/audiobook with a cliffhanger is unkind to your fans. No worries Donna, I still love you and your artistic creations!

Holy cow, this is brilliant!

What a masterpiece! The story is twisted, compelling, with unbroken suspense. It is a cozy mystery but wow. Given when it was written....today those are almost real scenarios. The story uses only a few characters which are so lively painted that one does not miss otjets. I only know one other writer with that talent and that is Stephen King. Go Donna Andrews!

Not Donna Andrews best

Usually I love Donna Andrews' novels so I was thrilled to find this series on Audible. The first book wasn't as good as her other series but it wasn't too bad and the idea seemed cute. This one got just got too tedious. Bernadette Dunne made a good attempt at sounding like a computer but after a while it just got too hard to listen to and grated on my nerves. I had to switch off periodically and listen to an other books.

Very dated story

The book must have been written in the 90s when computer technology was just developing AI.