In the near future, new technology records the highlights of emotional experience for others to share. Buy a helmet and you can feel the exhilaration of an Olympic ski jumper, or the heat of a lucid dreamer's erotic imaginings. Commit a crime, and you may be sentenced to endure the suffering you inflicted on others. But such recordings may carry more information than the public has realized. What will criminals learn about their victims? When a husband is wrongfully convicted of injuring his wife, how will their marriage change? And what uses will a sociopath find for recordings of the experience of death? **Awarded Five Stars by Readers' Favorite** "This is a novel that's impossible to pigeonhole into a genre. The presence of a technology that permits recording and playback of dreams is science fiction, but it's also a legal/crime thriller. The author, who has an extensive legal background, weaves it seamlessly into the story from start to finish. . . . The author uses third person point of view, and moves from one character to another to keep the suspense level high and the tension as tight as a steel cable on a suspension bridge. . . . Dialogue, descriptions, and narrative are flawless - not a wasted word anywhere. This is a book that will linger in your thoughts long after you've stopped reading - and are likely to invade your dreams. I give it a resounding five stars." -- Awesome Indies "If you enjoy a well-imagined thesis on the implications of future technology, or a nuanced exploration of human relationships, or just a gripping techno-thriller, then Playback Effect is well worth a look." -- Strange Charm
About the Author: Karen A. Wyle was born a Connecticut Yankee, but moved every few years throughout her childhood and adolescence. After college in California, law school in Massachusetts, and a mercifully short stint in a large San Francisco law firm, she moved to Los Angeles. There she met her husband, who hates L.A. They eventually settled in Bloomington, Indiana, home of Indiana University. Wyle has been a voracious and compulsive reader as long as she can remember. She majored in English and American Literature major at Stanford University, which suited her, although she has in recent years developed some doubts about whether studying literature is, for most people, a good preparation for enjoying it. She has been reading science fiction for several decades, but also gobbles up character-driven mysteries and historical fiction, with the occasional foray into anything from chick lit to military history. Wyle's voice is the product of almost five decades of reading both literary and genre fiction. It is no doubt also influenced, although she hopes not fatally tainted, by her years of practicing appellate law. Her personal history has led her to focus on often-intertwined themes of family, communication, the impossibility of controlling events, and the persistence of unfinished business. Wyle and her husband have two essentially-grown and wildly creative daughters, as well as a sweet but neurotic dog.