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The problem has always been that she starts a series and then leaves readers hanging. (Where's the final book in the Tale of the Five, Ms Duane? We've been waiting for "The Door Into Starlight" for over a decade now. And the third cat wizard novel?) The one exception to this is the Young Wizards series, which is now nine volumes. The last two show signs that Ms Duane had her mind partly on her many other projects: the plots are not as tight as earlier books in the series.

This is the first installment of another series. Unusually for Duane, it reads just like an opening novel in a series. Lots of exposition, lots of description, plot moves slowly. Thankfully it doesn't have a cliff-hanger ending: the particular threat that emerges in this book is fully resolved by the end of the novel.

The interesting idea for the setting: in the not-too-distant future, online gaming has reached a level of "reality" that allows your consciousness actually to inhabit your avatar when you're in the game. In a nice touch of realism, the better the tech you can afford the more fully you inhabit your avatar. If you spend enough, you'll even be able to taste the food you eat inside the game. But the tech is cheap enough for people with a moderate income to buy it. And some gamers even prefer onscreen action, rather than inhabiting their avatars.

In the online game that's the focus of the novel (as opposed to the online game owned and operated by the bad guy), really good players are offered an opportunity to build their own "microcosm"--a "world" in the game's "universe." They then receive a share of the profits whenever another player goes into their microcosm.

Yes, profits. Unusually for Duane, the main plot of this novel is concerned with industrial espionage. Will the good guy's company--and the online universe it hosts--survive a cyber-attack? Or will the good guy's rival (who's an old business partner) succeed in crashing the universe, obliterating the good guy's wealth and leaving his thousands of staff unemployed?

If you're a Duane reader, you should know that all the swords are virtual. Yes, there are "battle" scenes, but they all take place in one level or another of virtual reality. No wizardry except the cyber magic of being either in an awesome online game or inside the software code that controls the game's servers. On the other hand, you don't get very far into the book before you wish the online game it describes existed in our reality!

This is a fairly strong offering by a very good author. It's a departure from most of her other novels. The big worry is that Duane won't come out with another novel in this series anytime soon.

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