Lury_Gibson is a collaboration between Adam Lury and Simon Gibson, two British authors who certainly know their high-tech stuff. This is the second of these rather frightening thrillers (the first was Dangerous D@ta, published in 2001). They have an unusual style -- instead of chapters they provide gobbets of stuff from the Internet (e-mail, police reports, credit ratings, etc.) on a recto page, with Dogg's commentary and analysis on the verso side, all very trim and seemingly minimal as storytelling. Yet it works very effectively. There is true detection in this, based on Dogg's analysis of the gobbledegook he finds searching and hacking through the Internet (and of course he is a superb hacker), although it is provided mostly by on-the-spot deductions based on what turned up in his on-line inquiries. (For example, I wouldn't have a clue how to analyze some of the data he comes up with, let alone know how to find it in the first place.) The premise is simply based on the fact that EVERYBODY leaves some record of their life on some computer system or other, and to those who know how to dig it up, it can be found and utilized -- hence this new form of armchair detective, Arthur C. Dogg, call him a keyboard detective. He never seems to leave his house (in fact seems to have no personal life at all except via e-mail with his clients, normally wives investigating their husband's infidelities by having Dogg track down their credit-card payments at country hotels and their e-mail records, cell-phone charges and numbers dialed, etc. -- but he does sometimes get involved against his own rules).
This book, as is the other, is a mixture of R. Austin Freeman's forensic legerdemain and Michael Crichton's high-tech thrillers. In this case, it involves DNA research where a scientist 'discovers' a gene that predisposes a person to go berserk. She hires Dogg to check out the behavior of several newly released jail prisoners who had tested positive for this DNA sequence in her genetic blood testing. Turns out she has doubts about her employer (who also tested positive when he volunteered to be a test sample), and she is right of course. He is plotting to sell her discoveries to an armament conglomerate specializing in 'battle management' so that they can suppress it (obviously any 'cure' based on gene-therapy would hurt their profits). 'Nuff said about that. Let me digress with an analogical perspective. Apparently (and I don't know this for a fact, but it's probably true), biotech companies can patent their genetic discovery, in effect blocking out research into its applications by potential rivals. Let's say some company finds the gene that predisposes one to Parkinson's Disease or Alzheimers. They can patent that, block all use of that information by anybody else, then sell it to, say, a pharmaceutical company that makes billions dispensing a drug that alleviates the symptoms but doesn't cure the disease; obviously the drug company doesn't want anybody to come up with a cure involving gene manipulation. This is not only frightening but obviously immoral -- and if this is happening, which wouldn't surprise me at all, then it should be banned by International treaty.
These Lury_Gibson books are fascinating, and they really provide true detection, although of a very strange nature.