De@dline. (Deadline).

It takes almost 300 pages for the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service to get the bad guys in this tepid remake of The Firm, but when they finally do, it's enough to convince you that these wolves in accountants' clothing are the scariest guys in town. It would be better to pay taxes on every cent of your income than bring them down on you. Murder a bunch of innocent people? They'll hardly notice. But try to cheat the government by diverting IRS funds offshore and evading taxes on your ill-gotten gains? Now that's a crime! When SoftCorp hires Michael Ryan, fresh out of Stanford, and lures him to Austin with plenty of perks and promises of more to come, he has no idea that his boss and some higher-ups in the company's only client--the IRS--are lining their pockets with government wealth. But when a dogged FBI agent goes solo to tie Softcorp to the murder of one of her own and finds herself thwarted by higher-ups in her own agency, she partners with Michael and his wife to uncover the conspiracy and save the day. Of course, she has to call in the CID to do it, but by that time the reader has spent so much time in the virtual reality program Michael created to make catching tax cheats easier that it's all a blur of bytes and bits. R.J. Pineiro's real talent is for making complicated technology understandable, but that's not enough to turn this into a read for anyone who's not halfway there already. --Jane Adams