Eugene Rodgers

AS DISCUSSED ON THE NATIONAL CABLE TV PROGRAM, "AMERICA TRENDS," "Femme Fatale Online" is an intriguing mystery.

Rick Collins participates in a virtual world called Personal Portal, or PP, populated by avatars controlled by participants at their home computers who can be anywhere in the world.  Using an expensive app, people can make their avatars look exactly like them in every detail. Through his avatar twin, Isaac, Rick spends all his PP time with another look-alike avatar, the sexy Joan d'Arc, who wants to have a romance. He's married with two toddlers and wrestles with the morality of a virtual relationship, finally deciding a PP romance is a harmless fantasy.

Joan's unknown animator gets him a job in the real world with a high-tech military contractor, and then reveals she's a spy for a huge international clandestine operation. She forces Rick into industrial espionage by blackmailing him with secretly-taped videos of their realistic-looking romantic activities. As the story develops, she threatens to kill him and his family unless he keeps his job, which is insecure and subject to vicious office politics. Rick, who knows absolutely nothing about the real Joan, realizes his family is doomed unless he can identify her and her whereabouts soon. As Rick stated his awful challenge, "I couldn't see any way to investigate a woman who was nothing but pixels on a computer screen."

Rick's job is in Pittsburgh, but circumstances have forced his family to remain in Virginia, and he's lonely. While he struggles to find the real Joan, one of the women he suspects of being her conducts a campaign to seduce him. Vulnerable and susceptible to an affair that would take his mind off Joan's terrifying threats, he gradually weakens.