A fast-paced and intelligently conceived techno-thriller.
An ambitious computer programmer is unknowingly drawn into a dangerous game of espionage.
Lenny Driver’s dream is to work for Blahst, a global social media company that’s the creative gold standard for computer programmers. At the interview, he’s asked to write a program and produces one that would allow for the speedy personalization of posts on the website, but he shows off his arrogance as much as his talent, and the job goes to Mari Velasquez, a classmate from college. Despondent, Lenny takes a lesser job working for professor Ramsey, an academic who is an expert on the mechanisms that make ideas go viral. Lenny writes a new algorithm that essentially encodes those ideas and is able to channel new fundraising dollars to Ramsey’s company, which is devoted to preventing AIDS in the developing world. Later, Lenny returns to Blahst as a guest of Mari, and he inadvertently learns that his interviewer, and Mari’s supervisor, Clayton Malloy, stole his algorithm and took credit for it. Incensed, Lenny discovers another purpose for the program he wrote for professor Ramsey: He can use it to anonymously disseminate targeted rumors about Blahst. The algorithm is even more successful than he anticipates, however. Not only does it prove embarrassing to Blahst, it also torpedoes its stock prices, and Blahst devotes a team of their own to tracking down the source of the rumors. Further, Lenny also unwittingly disrupted a secret government mission to claim mining rights in Africa, and as a result, a shadowy agent doggedly pursues him as well. Debut author Knight is a technology consultant, a professional perch that allows her to paint a realistic (and technologically inventive) picture of the social media cosmos. Also, her story is fascinatingly topical and examines the messy matrix between youthful talent, big business, and government interest that makes up the social media industry. Knight’s writing is crisply lucid if less than literary, though it does sometimes devolve into unconvincing clichés. For example, when trying to ascertain Lenny’s truthfulness, Mari draws his lips into hers, and then declares: “A kiss never lies.”
A fast-paced and intelligently conceived techno-thriller.Pub Date: March 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9987759-0-6
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Carbon Life Press
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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