When Boston P.I. Carlotta Carlyle decides to join the computer age and take her business on-line, she quickly learns that information is cheap and access can be deadly. Accustomed as she is to Boston's mean streets, cruising them regularly while moonlighting for the Green & White Cab Company, survival takes on a whole new meaning when Carlotta is hired to investigate a series of vicious attacks on cabbies. Her bosses, wheelchair-bound Gloria, the soul queen of cab dispatchers, and Sam Gianelli, Carlotta's on-again, off-again lover, are sending mixed messages. Not so her ex-boss: Lieutenant Mooney of the Boston police urges her to trade in her old .38 revolver for some high-tech hardware. Before it's too late. The questions - and violence - escalate when Sam reluctantly introduces Carlotta to his childhood friend, Frank, a code-busting data-bank genius who offers her the computer deal of a lifetime. But who is Frank? What dark history do he and Sam share? In Hardware, betrayal is an integral part of the program. As Carlotta realizes that nothing is private if you push the right buttons - and digs into Sam's past to discover that he's kept love alive with lies - rapidly unraveling secrets push her to the cutting edge of crime and heartbreak, where she finds her toughest assignment yet: to pick up the pieces of lives she holds dear and put them together again.