by Mark Russinovich ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2012
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
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BOOK REVIEW
by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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by Max Brooks
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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
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by Kathy Reichs
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by Kathy Reichs
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by Kathy Reichs
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