"An ingeniously twisty, witty, and fast-paced cybercrime chase novel in which the eponymous thief, who has stolen several lifetimes worth of money, flees northern California and makes her way across Oregon, Idaho, and Utah with a slew of men in pursuit, the relationships between herself and her male pursuers shaped by the protagonists' respective interpretations of the traces each leave in the cyberworld"--

Cybercrime leads to a cross-country pursuit as an ambitious, misfit young thief exploits a hacked microchip to rob banks, and learns too late that the wrong people have been watching her. Twenty-six-year-old Ruth excels at microchip design but decides to get rich the old-fashioned way: robbing banks. She becomes a cybercriminal and devotes five years to siphoning more than $250 million out of the banking system using a hacked firewall chip that she created and only she knows how to access. Then one night an alarm goes off and she realizes she's been discovered. Five hours later she's on the run, chased across California and the West by a slew of government agents who see her as both a high-level national security threat and a potential intelligence asset. They'll catch her dead or alive--whatever it takes to make sure no one else discovers what she knows. Each of these men is obsessed with the woman he's hunting, certain he knows what makes her tick. But Ruth, always a step ahead, armed with her ironic wit and a reluctant dog, eludes their understanding; can she elude their capture, too?