Romina Wilcox’s The Calendar: a New Cyber Genre for New Cyber World

The Internet, as well as the technological advances that have flowed from its creation, has undoubtedly made our lives easier in countless ways. The world has grown smaller and business faster; vast libraries of knowledge are now only a Google search away. But this progress is not without a price, for it has also created a new type of criminal and has turned the rest of us into his potential victims.

We have all seen the commercials for companies offering protection from identity theft; we have all seen the news stories about our government agencies, hacked into by internet pirates. Like it or not, cybercrime has become part of our daily reality, and this reality requires a different kind of hero. In the world of novelist Romina Wilcox, that hero is the young software architect and amateur sleuth, Joanne Gravtiz.

Gravitz, who Romina Wilcox refers to as “an ordinary woman placed in extraordinary circumstances”, first made her appearance in the 2007 thriller, Cold Eyes; where, after creating security software of the same name, she helped the FBI find the computer hacker who had brutally murdered a college professor. Now, in Wilcox’s much-anticipated follow-up novel, The Calendar, Gravitz is back to stop a tech-savvy terrorist from staging another attack against OmegaSoft, the corporation for which she works.

As the story opens, Gravitz has it all: a loving fiancée and a recent promotion to manager of OmegaSoft’s Critical Security Department. Now, as the company competes for a highly lucrative contract with the Department of Homeland Security, a terrorist with an agenda known only to himself blows up one of the company’s facilities. Joanne Gravitz is charged with conducting damage control with the now-skeptical Homeland Security, but she decides that while she’s at it, she’s going to find out who is targeting OmegaSoft—and its employees—for destruction. As she races against time to find the killer before he can strike again, she learns that he is tracking her movements through company’s intranet calendar. Thus begins a cat and mouse game between Gravitz and the deadly opponent who knows how to manipulate technology as well as she does.

In creating the world of her gripping suspense novels, cybercrime expert Romina Wilcox has combined her training in computer forensics with her fifteen years of real world experience in Silicon Valley. One thing’s for sure, The Calendar is so good that it will have everyone “marking the days” until her next novel.

The Calendar is available on http://www.rominawilcox.com/, as well as Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Be sure to listen to the Writers in the Sky Podcast on September 30 when Romina joins us to talk about The Calendar and her work in cybercrime.