What do You think about The Empress File (1992)?
The Empress File by John Sandford is book 2 of the Kidd and LuEllen mystery thriller series. Set in a small Southern town along the Mississippi, it delivers all the stereotypes: bigotry, racism, corruption, a political "machine", a beautiful young black couple who want to change it all for the better. Kidd is a master con artist, LuEllen a master burglar; they pull off a few key robberies, just to demoralize the bad guys (and of course gain some booty) even before they 'officially' arrive and check-in (covertly of course) with the young black couple. Kidd and LuEllen have the advantage of master hacker Bobby breaking into any/all confidential databases to pull private info on the town council members they plan to bring down. Kidd and LuEllen arrive on a houseboat; Kidd's disguise is true and easy to maintain (he really is a painter; one of the council members has one of his paintings) and he really does enjoy sketching scenes and capturing the light. LuEllen wears a crystal necklace and owns a supposedly magical crystal ball - since Bobby's research told them the town mayor is superstitious. Between the rigged crystal ball and Kidd's tarot readings, they fool the mayor very well. The most dangerous thug they never fool is Duane Hill, the dogcatcher. In all his appearances in the story he's violent, cruel, vicious (you've been warned). Kidd and LuEllen mostly pull it off, but of course there must be hiccups to add suspense...
—Susan
This is a transition novel, written at a point where the technology was not so old and established that the author could just mention it in passing and assume the reader would know what it was and how it worked, but also at the moment that the technology was so new that there was a kind of excitement about all that new potential in a future with computers in every house! The result is a book that I read with a happy feeling of nostalgia for the days of dial-up bulletin boards and dos-based pine mail, and about ten years of knowledge that I never thought I would need again. Happily I was wrong. This is a very good book, and the suspense story is a little shopworn and predictable, but the telling and the characters carry it off with real style. This book has a ton of pages, but every one was a pleasure to read. I will however point to one huge error in the blocking, just because I was so happy to have found ONE error in a book with a lot of complicated action. In the scene where they are breaking into city hall by way of the roof, they are trapped at one point by a door that is blocked on the other side by a filing cabinet. They get past this problem by pulling the hinge pins and removing the door. Problem is, the door opened into the other room, so the hinges were on the far side of the door from them. Ooooops. Oh well. a really fun novel.
—Alger
This is the second book in the Kidd and LuEllen series by John Sandford. I was disappointed in this book, the story was weak and the characters not particularly believable. But worse than that, I suppose my personal morality worked against my opinion of this story. Kidd and LuEllen are criminals - and although the book tries to make them into (almost) "good guys" they remain thieves whose actions lead to the deaths of 5 people. They take an "ends justify the means" attitude and rationalize their behavior - even though all they have done is replace a crooked, racist white city government with a potentially crooked, racist black city government. Sure the town was awful when the story began, and it is easy to say that any change is for the better, but there were legal channels they should have taken, rather than burglary, theft and blackmail.
—Bruce Snell
