A convincing, complex cyberthriller.
A computer programmer becomes the target of international criminals in Diamond’s (Warren Lane, 2015) thriller.
Russ Eugene “Genie” Fitzpatrick, now approaching 30, works as an app developer in Richmond, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Russ used to be a programmer with fellow code-nerd Charles Allen “Hatter” Taylor in San Francisco, but the two haven’t seen each other in four years. Hacker Charlie got into deep trouble in the underground “dark web,” and while he had the FBI on his tail, he also had multiple women on the string, including his latest muse, Cali. “You’re just as devious as I am,” he once told Russ. “Only I embrace my inner deviant….And you run from yours.” But Russ stops running from aberrance after Charlie’s car goes off a cliff and his body is found, charred, with a bullet hole in the skull. Soon Russ gets heavily involved in a world of code cracking and head cracking, linked to an online market for illegal and/or stolen items called the Twilight Bazaar, known as “the ATM of the dark web” for global criminal organizations. After its servers suddenly go down, international thugs think Charlie may have given Russ an encryption key to the site—and its millions of dollars. Russ, however, is less concerned with money than he is with Cali; his heart goes vroom when he first sees a photo of her in front of a cherry-red Impala. Along the way, she tells him, “You dwell on the details….Most people let the little things slide.” The same could be said of author Diamond himself, who gets all the little things right, as well as the big ones, in this riveting novel. Details, such as the sound of silver bracelets jangling at a key moment, the thirst for a Mountain Dew after a rough night, and the moldy smell of a cheap motel blanket, complement the main action. The dialogue, too, is right on the bitcoin when the characters are sober—and also believably unfocused when they are drunk or high, which is fairly often.
A convincing, complex cyberthriller.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9963507-3-0
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Stolen Time Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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