‘All Trap No Bait’ dives into digital secrets and hard times

For anyone who has speculated about what could happen with the miscellaneous social media accounts people have started and abandoned over the years — think Myspace, Friendster or the multitude of forgotten blogs still cycling through cyberspace — North Carolina author Joseph Worthen ventures into the nefarious world of dark-web chat rooms to assert a stunning possibility.

In his delightfully morbid and sardonically humorous debut novel, “ All Trap No Bait ,” Worthen articulates how personal information left on the web could be gathered to provide a fertile source of blackmail material.

It takes Beverly “Bev” Jane Ornett, an unemployed 24-year-old slugging through COVID during the summer of 2020 in Mobile, Alabama, a bit of sleuthing to figure out she is her own information breach.