Virtual Murder
By Jennifer Macaire

      Quoting bits of Walt Whitman with each chapter, Macaire offers a science fiction story of virtual proportions, and as readers will discover, virtual proportions means one can go as far as one desires. Be prepared to suspend your disbelief.

      Virtual Tours isn’t your typical tour business. Their tours go anywhere in the world and the customer is never put out by late flights or bad car rentals. Virtual Tours allows their customers to take on their own identity or that of someone more attractive. Most of their customers are working women, so the tour guides are young, attractive men. Mutual attraction is expected, but can’t be activated, so relationships are purely platonic – or so they think, until a dead tour guide is found hooked up in his virtual chair. When they discover that the young man died of a heart attack, it is concluded he experienced a state of sexual Nirvana, that is, he was raped to death. The Net and the government suspect a virus and a mutant, but how is it possible? Mutants are suspended in cases, in total solitude. Is a virus, like porn on the net, blazing across the tours, destroying lives? Can they stop it before it kills again?

      Virtual Murders will appeal to Sci-Fi readers, Net fanatics and gamers alike. The story is science fiction, with a bit mystery and government intrigue.