The Trojan Dog by Dorothy Johnston

Publisher's Synopsis

'I should ask your department's accountant whether he's missing nine hundred thousand bucks.' This is the anonymous message that will change Sandra Mahoney's life

When a powerful but unpopular bureaucrat is accused of theft and computer fraud, Sandra is convinced that the charge is false. But how to track down the culprit when almost anyone could be an enemy? In her search for the trut, Sandra finds herself in a battle of wits against an elusive and unscrupulous opponent, a battle in which no-one's allegiance can be taken for granted.

The Trojan Dog is a compelling story of computer crime, loyalty and betrayal against the backdrop of a city - and a country - on the cusp of political change.

My Review of The Trojan Dog by Dorothy Johnston

Rae Evans is an old friend of Sandra's mother, disliked by her colleagues, but Sandra feels she owes her the benefit of the doubt over the fraud charges. Then, when her own computer files are altered following another virus attack, she is given the motivation to conduct her own amateur investigation. She is assisted by Ivan, a computer geek working in the DIR and he provides her with plenty of technical support, enough to immerse them both into the virtual world of the hacker.

Through all of the uproar and the initial stages of Sandra's searching for answers, name of one company continually crops up. Compic is a small graphics firm that is growing quickly, winning contracts with quite a few government departments. But in their investigation, Sandra and Ivan discover that there is some sort of link between Compic and the bogus company that led to Rae Evans' downfall. It's on this trail that the bulk of the story hinges.

To describe the pace of this novel as slow would be vastly overstating things. I don't mind books that unfold carefully provided some sort of obvious progress is being made, whether it's in the plot or the character development, but this took on glacial creep proportions.

The plot is achingly straightforward yet very little is done to keep it moving. There are problems with continuity coupled with a paucity of logic flow which has us thrown from one bewildering scenario to the next with little explanation given as to what Sandra is trying to achieve.

Opportunities that may have injected a little life into the plot are created with the beginnings of a romance, a dalliance with cutting edge computer software and hints of intrigue involving Sandra's mother's past, but rather than explore the possibilities raised by each sub-plot, they tended to wither away without explanation.

Time and again Sandra, playing her part as the amateur sleuth, would decide that she should confront someone by questioning them. Given that this was her only real way of gathering any kind of evidence it should have been a crucial part of her investigation, possibly acting as a springboard for the pieces to begin falling into place. But time after agonising time her questions are completely ignored and not only does she come away with no answers, she also comes away with no real impression about whether the person was hiding something, was acting guilty or evasive or seemed completely innocent. Effectively, we are given nothing and the question that kept coming to me while reading was...what was the point of that? It turns out the answer to my question was simple - there was no point at all.

Unusually, for a story told in the first person narrative, all character interactions felt very impersonal with very few revelations made about any of the characters, either their background or even Sandra's impression of them. Everyone felt just as much a stranger at the end of the book as they were at the start.

Ironically, the following line comes 20 pages from the end of the book:

The waiting and stumbling, the trial and mostly error were becoming unendurable.

Which drew a big Amen from me. Not only was I getting completely fed up with the ambiguous nature of the story, but Sandra Mahoney herself was becoming restless.

The Trojan Dog is a mystery with a plot that simply contains too many blind alleys for me to find interesting. The storyline jumps all over the place without really ever progressing satisfactorily and the characters are only ever vaguely introduced. To top things off, the ending, when it finally came around, turned out to be a bit of a non-event with a low key resolution which, when all is said and done, is probably appropriate.