WWW.Sex.Net

When jaded San Francisco stockbroker Sloane Wood acts on an illegal private tip on the Internet, her life is thrown into turmoil as she attempts to learn the identity of her provocative source while dodging the SEC. First-novelist Lee, who works for a Silicon Valley technology firm, is clearly familiar with the wildly varied contents of the World Wide Web, where one can browse through pornography as easily as one can peruse the stock markets. Though her novel purports to exploit the seamy side of the Internet, however, she tap-dances around the subject of hardcore cyberporn. Even Sloan Wood's kinky tastes in anonymous sex come off as run-of-the-mill rather than erotic or exciting. Conversations taking place online in a sexually explicit chatroom are neither shocking nor titillating, and a scene alleged to come from a snuff film seems tacked on merely to punch up the book's scandal quotient. Encumbered by a ludicrous second-person point of view (""You pour the coffee.... You type....""), the narrative lacks genuine character development. Cynical Sloane elicits little empathy during her self-destructive plunge into danger and violence. In addition, Lee takes an easy cop-out in identifying the mysterious interloper. What is presented as a sensational expose of the squalid precincts of cyberspace is instead a novel that never transcends the device of its conception. (May)