Top-notch geek lit.
In his second techno-thriller, Russinovich’s (Zero Day, 2011) computer-genius power couple, Jeff Aiken and Daryl Haugen, find themselves enmeshed in a Chinese government attack on the Internet.
And right from the headlines, the Chinese also want to rid Iranian computers of the Stuxnet virus that will let the mullahs test their nuclear weapon. With the first third of Russinovich’s novel offering a precis on vulnerable computer networks and evildoer apocalyptic plans, readers learn Aiken and Haugen fired the code-bullets that defeated Al Qaida geek-terrorists. They’re now a couple and operate Red Zoya Systems LP, a computer security company. Aiken is called to London to cope with a virus wreaking havoc after transmission via a document attachment. Exotic locales sprinkle Aiken’s itinerary, including Geneva, where the virus was installed; then Prague, the lair of Ahmed Hossein al-Rashid, an Iranian undercover agent; and then Ankara and the dangerous road to Iran. The London-discovered virus is Chinese, and Col. Jai Feng, the People's Liberation Army’s computer warfare chief, has also developed a work around for Stuxnet for the mullahs. Not satisfied, PLA-techies are also code-infiltrating the U.S.’s 7th Fleet computers and inserting a Trojan horse into the U.S.’s electric power grid computers. Russinovich, a Microsoft Technical Fellow, turbocharges the narrative once an assassination-kidnap team, led by Ahmed, kidnaps Aiken and Haugen in Geneva, with Aiken escaping and then rescuing Haugen in Prague. Thriller action, true, but the story occasionally bogs down when it goes full nerd. However, it switches scenes rapidly enough to keep interest churning, especially with characters like CIA tech-wizard Frank Renkin; Saliha, a beautiful Turk immigrant in Prague seduced into muling code into Iran; and Gholam Rahmani, aka Hamid, a triple-agent with his own agenda. Heavy on tech terms, much worried about the ever-growing vulnerability of the Internet, Russinovich is nuanced enough to write terrorists as sometimes insecure, frustrated and anxious, authoritarian states as rotten with the human frailties to be found in every society, and good guys engaging in near-plausible heroics.
Top-notch geek lit.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-01048-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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