Peter Maxwell expects a staff team-building exercise to be tedious rather than lethal, but the day changes when a man is found dead during a paintball session. The victim proves to be an escaped prisoner serving a sentence for computer hacking, and the circumstances of his death leave the police with a puzzle that seems to belong as much to the digital world as to conventional murder investigation.
The case becomes personal when disturbing messages begin reaching Maxwell’s pupils. Someone appears able to manipulate phones and information with a skill the dead hacker should have taken to the grave. Maxwell, famously hostile to modern technology, has to understand a form of evidence he would rather avoid while working out who is exploiting the dead man’s abilities and why Leighford’s students have become targets.
