The White Tower is the second book in Dorothy Johnston’s quartet of Canberra-based crime novels. When the story begins, Sandra Mahoney and Ivan Semyonov, who met in in the government department where the first of the series is set, have launched a computer security business. They are also living together and have a daughter. Mahoney has a son by her first marriage.
The theme of parental responsibility is important in The White Tower which begins with a grieving mother hiring Sandra to find out what happened to her son.
Niall Howley’s apparent suicide is linked to the death of his character in a MUD game called ‘Castle of Heroes’, but his mother has never been satisfied with this conclusion. The controller of the MUD is am enigmatic Irishman based in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, with a penchant for the poetry of WB Yeats.
Mahoney’s investigation takes her Ireland while she quietly discovers more and more layers to Niall’s life and work. Detective Sergeant Brook, the third of Johnston’s series characters, becomes in the investigation when, back in Australia, Mahoney’s son is kidnapped. It is Brook who finally unmasks the killer. As it turns out, Niall didn’t have just one secret passion; he had another, far more deadly than a MUD game. ( )