However, she has pursued Kovner both in Real and through Netherwood long enough that she is way too attracted to him for her own good.

One of them, Kovner, is the man responsible for the sabotage. Upon her arrival, Talia learns that there are two missing employees who have managed to flee into the forests and avoid being detected by the grid. Full of heavily forested unchartered territories, Fresh Havens is plagued by continuous sabotage on the mining activities. Our heroine, Talia Fortune, has been appointed the new sheriff of Fresh Havens, a wild planet populated only by a small colony of FortuneCorp employees. Netherwood is the “bad district” of the Grid, where people go to live out the virtual life on the fast lane by playing criminals, daredevils, and such. Oh, and rich people who can afford it can “cheat death” by having their consciousness downloaded into a chip and integrated into the grid so that they can continue existing in the grid even if they have died in the Real. Some find their virtual lives so much more appealing than life in Real that they spend as much time in there as possible. People of that time also enjoy playing an advanced version of a massive multiplayer online role-playing game thing where they create avatars and enter a three-dimensional virtual world where they can play all kinds of roles and reenact all kinds of fantasies. The grid is owned and maintained by FortuneCorp. Called the “grid”, this is like the Galaxy Wide Web rather than the World Wide Web. Because of the widespread distribution of humans across the galaxy, a centralized method of communication and information distribution is created. Set in the future – the story is vague about specific dates, so the best I can say is that it takes place after the 22nd century – people are now colonizing other planets out there. Because I can’t stand the heroine and the story is told entirely from her point of view, I have a hard time warming up to the story. In fact, I cannot stand her at all by the last few chapters of the story. However, I am also very disappointed by the heroine. It is easily one of the most interesting paranormal romances I’ve read. A part of me really, really, really wishes that I can give Netherwood a better review because I love the concept and the setting of this story.

Netherwood by Michele Lang