My first published novels were my Patricia Delaney eGumshoe mystery series, published in the early 1990s in the U.S. by Fawcett Books (a division of Random House) and in the mid 1990s in the U.K. by Women's Press Ltd. In the early 1990s, when the Internet was newfangled and personal computers were still cutting edge. Certainly a PI using computer research as part of her detective tool kit was rare in real life and, at that point, brand new in fiction. Patricia was one of the first--if not THE first--detective in fiction to use computer database and Internet research to solve her cases.

Patricia Delaney was an 'electronic gumshoe,' or 'cyber PI,' or 'computer-whiz detective,' solved crimes--her nickname depending upon who was writing the marketing copy at any given time. It was fun then to push the edge with what Patricia could do with computer technology; now what she was able to do in the 1990s seems positively commonplace. Her stories hold up, though, as tales of passion, crime, and human strengths and weaknesses, and if read as historical (because by now, the 1990s definitely are historical, and in terms of technology, ancient), they also provide an interesting insight into the early years of computer technology as it began to make its way into our every day lives.