P.J. Gray, a single mother whose move from high-powered market research to police work as a St. Louis forensic psychologist was chronicled in Shirley Kennett's earlier novel Gray Matter, is back in a new high-tech thriller. This time P.J. and her rumpled, rule-breaking partner Leo Schultz are up against a sadistic killer who's preying on the faculty of Deaver Junior High School--coincidentally, the same school where P.J.'s son Thomas is a seventh grader. While her innovative virtual reality program can reconstruct the grisly crimes so P.J. can see the murders from the victim's point of view or even the killer's, it can't reveal what Schultz grasps intuitively and the reader understands before the killer strikes a second time: the perpetrator is a sadist who's equal to P.J. in his command of a deranged cyberworld. With his computer tools, he rehearses his bloody scenarios before he carries them out. Meanwhile, a year-old unsolved art-gallery murder and a slowly flowering romance between P.J. and the father of Thomas's best friend (or is it between P.J. and her irascible partner?) keep the reader's interest from flagging while the cybernetics-generated central plot unfolds. Fans of Kennett's previous P.J. Gray suspense novels will appreciate the literary multitasking in Cameleon. --Jane Adams
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