SOURCE: Murphy, Bernadette. “Whodunit Cloaks Issues of Marketing, Technology.” Los Angeles Times (4 March 2003): E11.

In the following review, Murphy asserts that Pattern Recognition is both an intriguing mystery and a timely social commentary.

Cayce Pollard is the cutting edge of contemporary culture. An uber-cool young urban woman, Cayce is able to recognize hip trends before they take off, thereby allowing her marketing clients to “commodify” those trends and reap abundant profits. “It's about group behavior pattern around a particular class of object,” Cayce explains in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, an intriguing novel of technology, art, marketing manipulation and mystery.

“I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does,” Cayce explains, and then “I point a commodifier at it.”

There are two particular developments, though, that Cayce can't decipher. First, the whereabouts of her father, a security expert with possible ties to the CIA who went missing in...