In Access Denied by Donna Andrews, Turing Hopper, the artificial intelligence personality (AIP), has an enemy whom she has been trying to locate when she sees someone use his credit card to send a package to an unoccupied house. She has newly minted private investigator Tim stake out the house, but after long hours of sitting in the car in front of the house, he falls asleep. Thus he misses witnessing the murder of a man at the building. Turing’s team, which now includes private investigator Claudia and attorney Sam, takes on the credit card scam to look for this enemy. Along the way they find more criminals, break-ins, and murder.
Access Denied shifts a bit from the previous books in this series in containing less mystery and being more of an adventure. In its doing so, I missed getting to solve the puzzle with the team. However, I still enjoyed the book.
As in the two previous books, Access Denied poses philosophical questions to keep the readers’ interest. This time, it skips over the question of what defines a human and instead asks about the implications of having sentient AIPs. If someone steals one, is that property theft or kidnapping? Should such beings be recognized as having the rights of humans? What happens if an AIP goes down the road of evil instead of good?
The amazing Bernadette Dunne continues in performing the books in this series. I have already raved about her narration in all my previous reviews of the books by Donna Andrews, so rather than my repeating everything for the umpteenth time, I will suggest you look at my reviews of Dunne here.
I thoroughly appreciated this audiobook despite preferring the books that feature puzzles more than adventures. I give the book five stars.
