CL Pauwels at Large

**includes excerpts from Fatal Errors – available for pre-order now!

After the principle caught me snooping through personnel files – I just knew smarmy old Mr. D had some kind of record that needed to be exposed – Zigana, my grandmother, moved the two of us from North Dayton to dinky little Yellow Springs, Ohio, where she had a shop to sell her handmade jewelry. She’d been grumbling over the drive for a couple years anyway, but my latest effort at underhanded justice pushed her over the edge.

Being 15, I made the expected teenage fuss at leaving my friends and school and the only home I’d ever known…yada, yada. Just between us, I was looking forward to a new start. The same old battles I’d fought since kindergarten were getting old. Childhood bigotry may be inherited, but it’s still bigotry. Most kids didn’t really know what a Gypsy was (most of us prefer Romani nowadays), but there were enough old folks, and movie villains, to stir up all sorts of stupid prejudices. And I bore the brunt of them, what with the name Zigana saddled me with when my mother died giving birth. Who names a baby “Fatál”?

Yes, my name is Fatál, emphasis on the second syllable, please. And skip the jokes, I’ve heard them all. Zigana thought she was doing me a favor, warding off whatever evil spirits killed my mother. Try telling that to a seven-year-old, taunted every day with “Fay-tahl, Fay-tahl, touch her and you’re dead.”

Truth is, I didn’t really have many friends in high school anyway, no one I’d miss for more than a week. Besides, that first week in Yellow Springs, I found the computer club, and I was hooked. Zigana didn’t allow computers in the house, even kept all her business records by hand, so any time I needed access for school, I’d had to rely on the library. Now I could surf as much as I wanted, and my snooping went high-tech. I devoured a nifty little printed quarterly called 2600 and learned what a hacker was – and how to become one.

Then I met Rake, another new transplant, just before senior year and fell stupidly into my first love. We had so much in common. Loners raised by grandparents, bullied for years. Classic rock. And computers. It was like finding a missing part of me, the duad Plato talks about. I had no experience with men. I’d learned from Zigana to keep them at arm’s length like she did, but Rake’s charm stamped out my misgivings. I dumped my scholarship to Ohio University and followed him to the local community college. We studied computer science together in class and honed our hacking skills in his crummy studio apartment at night, along with my first forays into sex. I was a late bloomer.

Zigana had tried to warn me, said she saw disaster in my future when she read the Tarot. I didn’t listen. Instead, I let Rake convince me to help him crash the school network with a denial-of-service attack right before finals week. A practical joke, he insisted. Thing is, I was already a better hacker than he’ll ever be. I tweaked the code he’d cobbled together. I planted it in the system when he said it was time. When the Feds showed up because of all the Homeland Security paranoia, Rake dumped it on me and cut a deal. So much for true love.

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Fatal Errors picks up almost five years later, when Fatál accepts an almost-legal request by her new boss to hack the Ohio college where she’s rebuilding her life. But she discovers the school’s director is using the network for illegal reasons, leading to a second betrayal and the death of her best friend. Fatál is framed for the crimes, and she’s caught between rival law enforcement agencies, a suspicious probation officer…and a murderer. She marshals her personal geek squad, 21st-century tech savvy, and a too often ignored Romani sixth-sense to protect her newly reunited family and to give justice—and karma—a push.

Available now for pre-order with an August 13, 2024 release date from Crossroad Press.