Not the strongest espionage tale in the series, but still an entertaining one.
In this seventh installment of the Spies Lie series, a talented young hacker seeks revenge on behalf of her dead boyfriend.
After Charlette DeSpain’s boyfriend Martin Burns is falsely accused of stealing government secrets and meets a suspicious end in prison, she devotes her entire existence to becoming an ace computer hacker and using those skills to clear his name posthumously. Frustrated by the lack of interest in her findings, “she decided to try anything she thought had a chance of working, even if there were side casualties. They all deserved to die.” When Charlette—now known as the CypherGhost—tries to hack and crash a plane containing fellow hacking genius Ann Silbey Sashakovich, Ann thwarts the attempt using her own special abilities. Despite initially being at odds, the two young women team up when the government rounds up computer hackers—black and white hats alike—and sends them to concentration camps in the West (“There are two in the Nevada desert, three in the Utah mountains, five in Wyoming, and one in northern Arizona”). But despite a steamy romance with Ann, the devious CypherGhost may not be the ally she appears to be. When Ann and the CypherGhost both swallow highly advanced nanodevices that allow them to hack from inside their own heads, the stakes quickly escalate. Kane (ProxyWar, 2016, etc.) has produced his most outlandish espionage saga yet, and while one doesn’t doubt that the purported former spy has drawn on some elements of truth for his latest book, it feels much less grounded in reality than the previous series installments. Kane’s novels are always packed with enough terrifying detail to feel at least moderately plausible, if not horrifyingly prescient, but once his all-star hacker team deviates from computers and manipulates members’ brains, things start to feel less like Robert Ludlum and more like The Matrix. Nevertheless, the colorful cast of characters remains as engaging as ever, even as the story goes increasingly off the rails.
Not the strongest espionage tale in the series, but still an entertaining one.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9862321-9-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: The Swift Shadow Group
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
An improvement over The Dead Zone, with King returning to his most tried-and-true blueprint. As in The Shining, the psi-carrier is a child, an eight-year-old girl named Charlie; but instead of foresight or hindsight, Charlie has firestarting powers. She looks and a thing pops into flame—a teddy bear, a nasty man's shoes, or (by novel's end) steel walls, whole houses, and stables and crowds of government villains. Charlie's parents Vicky and Andy were once college guinea pigs for drug experiments by The Shop, a part of the supersecret Department of Scientific Intelligence, and were given a hyperpowerful hallucinogen which affected their chromosomes and left each with strange powers of mental transference and telekinesis. When Vicky and Andy married, their genes produced Charlie and her wild talent for pyrokinesis: even as a baby in her crib, Charlie would start fires when upset and, later on, once set her mother's hands on fire. So Andy is trying to teach Charlie how to keep her volatile emotions in check. But when one day he comes home to find Vicky gruesomely dead in the ironing-board-closet, murdered by The Shop (all the experimental guinea pigs are being eliminated), Andy goes into hiding with Charlie in Manhattan and the Vermont backwoods—and Charlie uses her powers to set the bad men on fire and blow up their cars. They're soon captured, however, by Rainbird, a one-eyed giant Indian with a melted face—and father and daughter, separated, spend months being tested in The Shop. Then Andy engineers their escape, but when Andy is shot by Rainbird, Charlie turns loose her atomic eyes on the big compound. . . . Dumb, very, and still a far cry from the excitement of The Shining or Salem's Lot—but King keeps the story moving with his lively fire-gimmick and fewer pages of cotton padding than in his recent, sluggish efforts. The built-in readership will not be disappointed.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1980
ISBN: 0451167805
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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