Judith Copek

I am likely the only person you will ever meet who was born in Montana. I grew up on the High Plains of Colorado and somehow achieved a B.A. in English from Rice University in Houston, Texas. After a stint in Chicago, I moved to New England where I spent twenty-plus years as an Information Systems nerd, a natural choice for an English major. Didn’t you know that English Literature and Computer Science go together like tomatoes and basil! Liberal arts analytic skills helped me survive re-engineering projects and the Millennium Bug. In my writing, I like to put a literary spin on technology, and to show technology’s humor and quirkiness along with its scary aspects.

When I’m not writing, cooking or digging in the garden, I’m on a Baltic beach or at Burning Man in the Nevada desert researching my next novel. I belong to Toastmasters, Sisters in Crime, and Mystery Writers of America.

My husband is from Germany and we spent many vacations in Göttingen where my in-laws lived. Finally, the town became the setting for The Shadow Warriors. Trips to Berlin and Rügen inspired other novels.

Here is a small description of The Shadow Warriors.

Emma Lee Davis must delve deep into the past to find a weapon to end the Infowar that threatens to de-stabilize a computer-dependent global economy. Project manager of a tiny firm of cyber-sleuths, Emma scrambles to make the connections between a body washing up on a beach in Singapore, and the technical derring-do at a German university.

She tracks a desperate hacker planning a unique software auction, a determined entrepreneur who will stop at nothing to acquire ‘bleeding edge’ software and tumbles onto a new generation of terrorists with their own agenda.

Emma and her colleagues are sucked into a vortex of lies, spies, and betrayals and ultimately into the sleaze and paranoia of Berlin in the months before the wall comes down. Not quite glamorous, sometimes nerdy, always nosy, irreverent and intuitive, Emma becomes the reluctant sleuth. She narrates the story as she scrambles to manage a software project and her complicated love life, while puzzling over the paradox, “if our mission is to stop computer crime, why are we abetting it?”

For German readers, here is the “auf Deutsch” version.

“The Shadow Warriors” beschreibt Information Warfare. Hacker aus allen Winkeln der Welt, wollen entweder bösartiges Software (die Schattenkrieger des Titels) erfinden oder stehlen. Sie können Kraftwerke und den Luftverkehr stillegen, sogar die Verteidigung eines Landes in die Knie bringen. Die Handlung spielt hauptsächlich in Göttingen, aber auch in Asien und Europa, einschliesslich Berlin bevor die Mauer fiel. Dennoch sind die Gefahren heute genau so akut wie damals, wenn nicht noch grösser. Emma Lee Davis, die Heldin des Romans, beschreibt die Hackerkultur in ihrer respektlosen Stimme. Sie riskiert ihr Leben und Ehe und muss sich fragen, “wenn wir Computerverbrechen verhindern sollen, wieso helfen wir denn dabei?