II.   T h e   T h r e e   B o o k s

Of the trio, the most eagerly awaited, heavily promoted and apparently most lucrative is the collaboration between Shimomura and Markoff. (Trade reports peg its advance at around $700,000, with additional movie and game deals bringing the tab near $2 million.) Its title reads like a late night marketing-meeting compromise that everyone got to tack a few words onto: "Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw -- By the Man Who Did It."

This force-fed title presages an awkwardness, and an arrogance, that the book, alas, fully delivers on. By the end of "Takedown," Shimomura has shredded his own courtly image and replaced it with a picture of near-inhuman condescension.

Where "Takedown" provides the view from Shimomura's corner, "The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin Mitnick" portrays events from the quarry's point of view, as recorded by Jonathan Littman, a journalist who was in telephone contact with Mitnick through most of the chase. (Littman has also accused Markoff of being not only an observer but a participant in the Mitnick manhunt.)

More effective in humanizing Mitnick than any of Littman's exhaustively reported phone conversations are "The Fugitive Game's" photos. By juxtaposing the now-familiar mugshot gargoyle with a more recent snapshot of a slimmer, amiable regular guy in jeans and a T-shirt, "The Fugitive Game" effectively undermines our natural revulsion to the earlier picture. It embarrasses us into a less knee-jerk, more even-tempered view.

A third volume, a quickie paperback by writer Jeff Goodell with the hype-laden title "The Cyberthief and the Samurai," offers far less inside detail but somewhat more context, coherence and chronological logic than its competitors.

With this much verbiage and talent dedicated to it, you'd think the Mitnick story would finally emerge with some clarity. Instead, the journalistic free-for-all only ends up muddying the biggest question of the story: Just how dangerous was Mitnick, and how damaging were his exploits?

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Next page: The harm and the hype