A mystery for intellectuals! Johnny Denovo, the main character in this novel, is a neuroscientist turned super-detective. He uses brain science to track down the bad guys. Denovo carefully cultivates his image and has rock star status in the world.

I enjoyed the plot and the dialogue was great. Kent uses a lot of pretty words but I found his style was a lot more "telling" than "showing" and consequently I couldn't get lost in the story as easily as I would have liked. ( )

Johnny DeNovo, ultra-cool and world famous detective, gets spam in his email box. Well, who doesn't? And why would such a mundane occurrence trigger an investigation? As with all great detectives, such as Sherlock Holmes or Philip Marlowe, when between cases, Johnny is bored. It is due to this lack of significant brain stimulation that he notices some peculiarities in his spam messages and sets out to make sense of the problem. Supported by both his beautiful publicity agent, Mona Landau, and his techno-geek friend, Tucker Thiesen, Johnny follows clues that take him from his Boston condo to the rolling hills of Virginia's horse country as well as to the side streets and art galleries of Paris.

Andrew Kent successfully delivers in this debut both an interesting sleuth as well as a cyber-crime that surprises and challenges the thoughtful reader. Most interestingly, he articulates the back-of-the-mind processes that permit a detective to understand what it is that has taken place in a crime, both in terms of the actual behavior as well as misdirected perception of behavior which allows the criminal to believe his or her acts have gone unnoticed. Just as Miss Marple would solve a crime by thinking of some seemingly unrelated occurrence in her village of St. Mary Mead, Johnny Denovo is a sleuth who toys mentally with metaphors,allowing useful connections to surface in his thinking and succeed in his public persona.

For more, click through to:
http://individualtake.blogspot.com/2009/03/spam-eggs-review.html ( )