Barbara D'Amato is no stranger to the world of mixing crime and computers. Her Killer.App novel was a best seller. Now she is back with an all-new mystery that has live video feed over the Internet as it's main focus. The book is called Help Me Please. Tom Dohery Associates published it.

Danni Gaston is a pretty girl. At three years old, this little blonde haired girl is a real charmer. She is at Mass in Chicago with her parents when someone has a heart attack. In the ensuing confusion, Danni is kidnapped. Two hours later a teenager in Iowa comes across a new web site. This one features a live video feed of Danni. Soon other people surfing the web find the site. Eventually a graphic artist for CNN sees the site. He begins to report on the site. The name of the web site was Help Me Please.

Danni's parents are people in the news. Her mother is the country-western singer, Maggie McKitteredge. Her father is Senator Neal Gaston from Missouri. This means that the kidnappers might want anything from money to political favors.

Deputy Chief of Detectives Polly Kelly starts the investigation. She has the police cordon off the area for several miles to try and search for the kidnappers. It's only a short while later that they find out about the web site with the camera on Danni. Right away Polly is feeling the heat from both her bosses and the family.

The FBI gets involved, with Special Agent Hannah Khalid being in charge on their end. Right away, there is a clash as the Feds want to handle the investigation one way and Polly wants to use a different approach.
Doing some cyber-sleuthing, the Feds attempt a raid on the kidnapper's location behind Polly and the Chicago PD's back. The raid doesn't get them anything but egg on their faces and they end up losing the live video feed of Danni.

In the mean time, there are some strange deaths occurring around Chicago. An apparent suicide on the commuter train may have been a murder. A man who took a walk from his home in the suburbs never returns. What, if anything, do they have to do with Danni's kidnapping?

All of a sudden the investigators trip onto a lead. The kidnapping may have been the work of a group calling themselves Bandwidth. They are a group of super-hackers whose leader is in prison for fraud and other crimes.

As Polly's cops and the FBI team race against the clock to find Danni, there are a couple of little subplots. The hierarchy in the Chicago PD needs to be shaken up. One of Polly's bosses has gone off the deep end. He may end up hampering the investigation. And Polly's mother has just moved in with her. The move couldn't have come at a worse time for Polly.

Help Me Please is a top-notch crime novel. Cyber-crime is the wave of the future and writers like Barbara D'Amato proves that you can get a good story out of it. Every Barbara D'Amato novel ends up making me want more of the same.