Hunting for Sparrows

When attempted breaches of the network firewalls at the datacenter of Wise Woman, Inc. turn the midnight calm into alarm, computer specialist Lauren is confronted with an all too urgent need to decipher the source of these cyber-attacks. Are they the work of a band of hackers or is it some sort of implanted ghost in the machine? Hard on the heels of the untimely death of Wise Woman's founder, Claire Wise, and with a frantic sell-off of the company's stock set to recommence at the market's opening bell, the very survival of this progressive, socially responsible corporation hangs perilously in the balance. Hunting for Sparrows is a clever and captivating play on the conventions of literary genres and traditional gender roles that subverts stereotypes and assumptions through a riveting, thriller-paced tale of greed and moral bankruptcy.
This fresh take on a classic brings to life the hyper-real hue of life amongst West Palm Beach's social registry and inside its shadowy corridors of corporate power. Here we find Thelma, Claire Wise's daughter and the novel's improbable heroine. She arrives in South Florida like a fish out of water, having spent her recent years in Boston living the life of an over-educated, disengaged woman of privilege. As Thelma's hunger for certainty and closure leads her deep into a miasma of danger and duplicity, Hunting for Sparrows takes us into a world of soap opera histrionics and intense psychological reflection in which lives are lost, reality is challenged, and loyalty is the cover for deception. Can paranoid delusion be explained away by the fact that people really are out to get you? Hunting for Sparrows is an intellectually adventurous, playfully irreverent work of fiction, with an ending that will make you want to go back and try to reassemble the pieces of this intricate and inspired literary jigsaw puzzle.

Beatrice Gerard is the nom de plume of a Florida-based author and educator. She has lived previously in England, continental Europe, and Latin America where she has written literary criticism published in newspapers and academic journals and taught courses on Elizabethan and modern English literature.