A light, pleasant-enough read, but the story fails to develop any real momentum, and there is little suspense in this tale...
Book critic Ephron writes about cyber security and the ultimate betrayal in her second novel (Never Tell a Lie, 2009).
Diana Banks interacts with society in an online world peopled by virtual friends and acquaintances. Even in her job as a cyber-security consultant, Diana attends business meetings held in virtual conference rooms in the persona of her avatar, a woman she calls Nadia. Her preference for the virtual world grew out of the panic attacks Diana began experiencing after her husband, an idealistic hacker named Daniel, fell to his death. The accident took place when the couple was mountain climbing in Switzerland with Daniel’s best friend, Jake. After Daniel, who was obsessed with disrupting what he saw as over-intrusive government, died on Eiger, Jake and Diana invested the life-insurance payout into a legitimate business. Now, instead of hacking into companies’ databases, they detect intrusions and guide companies through security fixes. One of the few people Diana still sees from the real world is her younger sister Ashley. While visiting with Diana, Ashley decides to accept an invitation to a flash event in the city and go in Diana’s place. Ashley then disappears, setting Diana on a frantic search to find her, aided by an online buddy she’s never before met in person, as well as her own intricate knowledge of the way virtual worlds operate. While Diana confronts her fears of the outside world through the haze of grief that remains following her husband’s death, she also realizes that whatever happened to her sister wasn’t really about Ashley, but about her. Eventually, Diana must find a way to conquer her twin demons of panic and anxiety and pull the plug on a conspiracy that could have far-reaching consequences. Ephron dresses up a paper-thin plot with lots of cyber jargon and an impressive understanding of how hackers work, but the characters remain flat and unengaging.
A light, pleasant-enough read, but the story fails to develop any real momentum, and there is little suspense in this tale of a woman who barricades herself from real life.Pub Date: March 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-185752-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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