An absorbing, tech-smart tale that unfolds in a tense prison setting.
An imprisoned hacker helps a rookie inmate while another new arrival proves a menace in this debut techno-thriller.
It’s 2010, and Tanto has been an unwilling resident of Hackers’ Haven for eight years. The government has dumped this hackers-exclusive prison somewhere in Texas. The inmates, who all go by their online handles, spend each day scouring for illegal acts on the internet; anyone scoring 500 “kills,” or captures, is up for parole. Double-H boasts countless rules that Tanto relays to Quidlee, the “rook” he mentors, who learns that even this prison has perks, like a healthy diet and medical attention. But another new inmate, Barca, complicates Tanto’s life. Barca is a legend among hackers (“The word hacking implies risk. Barca wants all the benefits of the hack, and none of the risk. He does virtually none of the work, but he has money to hire the best. With money comes power”). Inside Double-H, muscle-bound Barca threatens to upend Tanto’s relationship with Quidlee and knows way too much about the facility and its inner workings. But if Barca breaks rules, he’ll wind up in Guantánamo Bay, which Tanto can make sure happens. The only other option for getting rid of this bully is the most dangerous one—an escape plan. Pepper deftly amps up his engaging prison tale with perpetual threats. The sinister Warden Cyfib, for example, electrically shocks “hackvicts” via their implanted disciplinary chips. At the same time, Tanto delays completing his Cyfib-demanded software “monster”—its intent is to entice online users into illicit endeavors and then trap them. The author’s crisp writing smoothly clarifies technical jargon with no sign of condescension; this creates a protagonist/narrator who comes across as an endearing, sympathetic journeyman more than a highly skilled hacker. Nevertheless, Tanto’s adherence to the Japanese Bushido code isn’t entirely convincing, as he’s White and the origin of his “training” is unclear. But a sequel, which Pepper seems to be aiming for, may shed light on the hero’s largely mysterious background.
An absorbing, tech-smart tale that unfolds in a tense prison setting.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-958011-02-7
Page Count: 369
Publisher: Hustle Valley Press
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
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