SOURCE: “So You Want to Be a Shaman,” in New York Times Book Review, July 21, 1996, p. 9.

In the following review, Slavitt offers positive assessment of Lady With a Laptop.

The conceit is quite lovely. What D. M. Thomas apparently dreamed up was a jokey mystery he could write in which Ruth Rendell comes in as a character to reveal the motive and identity of the murderer. Meanwhile, the protagonist of Lady With a Laptop, Simon Hopkins, a grumpy midlist novelist, can make entertainingly snotty remarks about the holistic holiday center on Skagathos, an imaginary island in the Sporades, where he is a workshop leader. Mr. Thomas, the English novelist, has himself led workshops at the center on Skyros, which is, he says, nothing like that on the smaller, fictive island an hour's boat ride away.

While Hopkins is running his small and steadily diminishing writing group, other facilitators...