Choppy, ditsy tale of a Gen-X slacker on the trail of a homicidal hacker who uses exploding floppy disks to eliminate fellow hackers who blunder through the ``back door'' of a data- encryption program. Coming off their nonfiction exposÇ of the hacker elite, Masters of Deception (1995), technology journalists Quittner and Slatalla deliver a cumbersome, talk-soggy cute-kids-in-peril adventure that often reads more like a niche-marketed YA. Harry Garnet, having failed to land a permanent job with a Syracuse firm after graduating from law school, is content to let another lazy summer slide by living in the Adirondacks and doing odd jobs around a nearby lakeside resort. One morning he innocently delivers a package containing a fatal floppy disk to math professor Frederick Ames and his slender, red-headed archaeologist daughter Annie. The disk explodes inside the professor's computer, killing him and putting Garnet in the hospital. Fascinated by Annie, Garnet later follows her to Manhattan, where he discovers an ``urban crypto militia'' that hangs out at Cafe Info, a computer-wired restaurant. There, he's befriended by the wealthy and pony-tailed Lionel Sullivan, a software designer who thinks that some madman is blowing up innocent computer geniuses who, like Professor Ames, have found a deadly flaw in a data-encryption program called Patriot, designed to protect user privacy on the Internet. Garnet agrees to use his untried legal skills to stop Patriot before a congressional subcommittee votes to impose it on the cyber community, while Sullivan helps him and Annie navigate a virtual- reality maze to find the killer. Quittner and Slatalla describe their hero's hapless heroics with a fey insouciance that becomes as cloying here as in their previous psychokiller whodunits (Mother's Day, 1993; Shoofly Pie to Die, 1992). Some fascinating cyber-scenes about how distinctive personality traits seep through the most impersonal computerized disguises, but abundantly clunky dialogue and cutesy asides stall the suspense.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-14366-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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