Do man's sexual appetites sustain the Internet? SCREEN PREY, a mystery novel by John R. Lion, takes readers into the shadow world of illegal pornography and sexual exploitation as investigators track a major traffic trafficker in child images. As the story opens, it is the middle of the night and detectives Slaby and Mayo are urgently flown to the Bethesda Naval Hospital. There, they witness an FBI agent mortally wounded by a major trafficker in child pornography. Or so a marine general gravely informs them. Slaby and Mayo have doubts. They know the justice department's hunt for child porn to be a relentless one, but a shoot-out at Washington's Union Station in broad daylight sounds like a Mexican drug war. Such warfare, the general asserts, is exactly what the huge profits in pornography have led to. Both detectives are recruited to locate the porn producer, but Slaby learns that his ex-wife, herself a federal agent, has been assigned to work undercover on the same case. Still bitter over the divorce, Slaby must protect her as he enters a vast underground of human sexuality and discovers a conspiracy at the highest levels of government. "There is a huge and lucrative underground for sexual materials available on the computer, and pornography is among the larger economies of the world since the advent of the Internet," Lion says. "Yet the general public has limited knowledge about the business and practices of on-line sexuality." SCREEN PREY brings this material to awareness.