What a book! I'm talking about Jon Evans' Dark Places, published under the Dark Alley imprint. The protagonist is an adventure traveler, a top-notch but distracted computer programmer whose first love is backpacking across remote areas of the world. In Nepal, he discovers a hiker who has been murdered in the same way his girlfriend was murdered in Cameroon. That sets in motion a hunt which takes us to Indonesia, West Africa, San Francisco, London, and the darkest recesses of the internet in an effort to track down this serial killer.

Jon Evans himself is an adventure traveler, which is the only way he could write this book with so much local texture. But the internet stuff, with cryptic communications with the killer, and more than you may want to know about the ways we leave digital footprints, really made the book for me.

This was an utterly fascinating book, one of the few in a long time that I absolutely couldn't put down. Evans has several other novels out there. They've jumped immediately to the top of my must-read list.