FICTION

THE INCURSION by Dirk Hanson (Little, Brown: $16.95; 288 pp.). Peter Cassidy is just a regular guy in today’s world, a 29-year-old solid-state physicist working for a major corporation who got tired of it all and decided he’d rather go fly fishing. So he chucked his job and did just that.

But he gets called back. It starts as a security test for which his special knowledge is needed and quickly turns into a bizarre plot to destroy the world’s computers and data banks with Cassidy as the prime suspect. The instrument of destruction--don’t laugh--is to be a uniquely amplified song by the reunited The Who at a Bay Area rock concert.

Dirk Hanson performs his craft well here. You’ll find a compelling blending of fact with fancy in a suspense story that keeps you guessing. It seems like you’ve read about many of the computer hacking incidents Hanson weaves into his plot, and some of the characters will seem to be lifted straight from reports in the newspaper. In fact, Hanson has borrowed heavily from real events, but he deftly twists them into fiction.

When I finished, I found myself thinking back, trying to pinpoint the places where fiction departed from plausibility. All I’ll say is that the SEEK computer network and the DID Corp. don’t exist--not under those names, anyway.