BRIETMarketplace

A Moment of Doubt is at turns hilarious, thrilling, and obscene. Jim Nisbet’s novella is ripped from the zeitgeist of the ’80s, and set in a sex-drenched San Francisco, where the computer becomes the protagonist’s co-conspirator and both writer and machine seem to threaten the written word itself. The City as whore provides a backdrop oozing with drugs, poets and danger. Nisbet has written a madcap meditation on the angst of a writer caught in a world where the rent is due, new technology offers up illicit ways to produce the latest bestseller, and the detective and other characters of the imagination might just sidle up to the bar and buy you a drink in real life. The world of A Moment of Doubt is the world of phone sex, bars and bordellos, AIDS, and the lure of hacking. Coming up against the rules of the game—the detective genre itself—has never been such a nasty and gender-defying challenge.