An edgy thriller that moves from the underground music scene of southern California to the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, Keith Snyder"s latest is a return trip with Jason Keltner, a starving artist and composer of electronic music who"s drawn into a world where reality is a construct that depends on the hardware that creates it. When multimedia guru Huey Benton dies at a party in front of Jason"s eyes, it seems at first to be an alcohol-stimulated accident. But things are not always as they appear. Jason begins to suspect that Paul Reno--the computer genius he"s been asked to watch--may be involved in the death. All Jason really wants is to finish his latest composition and find a title for it, but when mysterious men start following him and threatening his life, not to mention his somewhat stalled career, he"s forced to take a more active role in protecting a piece of computer hardware known as a dongle from people with no compunctions about committing murder to get their hands on it. Coffin"s Got the Dead Guy on the Inside is an interesting take on a part of the music world that will be new to many readers. It is written by a multimedia designer, composer, and filmmaker who introduced his unlikely hero in Show Control. --Jane Adams