You are Philip M. Noir, Private Investigator. A mysterious young widow hires you to find her husband's killer-if he was killed. Then your client is killed and her body disappears-if she was your client. Your search for clues takes you through all levels of the city, from classy lounges to lowlife dives, from jazz bars to a rich sex kitten's bedroom, from yachts to the morgue. "The Case of the Vanishing Black Widow" unfolds over five days aboveground and three or four in smugglers' tunnels, though flashback and anecdote, and expands time into something much larger. You don't always get the joke, though most people think what's happening is pretty funny.

Author Biography

Robert Coover is widely regarded as one of America's most influential living writers, author of some fifteen groundbreaking books of fiction, including Pricksongs & Descants, The Public Burning, and most recently Ghost Town. Coover has for the past decade been teaching experimental courses in hypertext and multimedia narrative at Brown University. His 1992 essay on hypertext in the New York Times Book Review, "The End of Books," galvanized electronic literature fans around the world.