2000 Past Reviews:
 Reviewed in January, 2000
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Y2K: The Day the World Shut Down, by George E. Grant and Michael S. Hyatt
Paperback, Word Books, 1998, $12.99, 268 pages
 OfficeConcepts shoots the messenger when chief information officer Bob Priam outlines his extensive and expensive plan to make the company Y2K compliant. Abruptly fired, he starts his own Y2K consulting firm and hits the jackpot when he invents a cheap chip to override faulty imbedded systems. Ajax, a greedy sociopath, is making a fortune off of Y2K. His programming team, code named Chernobyl, uses their access to corporate computers to install back-doors to company information systems and siphon off cash. He assaults Priam's country hideaway to steal the plans for the override chip and kidnaps his daughter. The good guys triumph, learning that faith and community are more important than technology.
This is a new genre for me - a Christian thriller - and I have to confess that I didn't like it. The heavy-handed moralizing and pompous descriptions of the hero's faith life detract from both the plot and the pace of the book. Naming most of the characters after ancient Greeks (Priam's kids are Cassandra, Troy and Hector) was too cute and the writing was immature and hurried, showing off the authors' erudition with smug lists of classical books they have read. However, if you take this as a fictional, easy-to-read primer on the technical and social aspects of the Y2K crisis, it's a winner. The research is excellent, there are extensive quotes from reputable sources and as Priam explains the complexities of Y2K to his family you learn along with him. I had never considered the danger of panicked companies giving unvetted programmers access to their corporate records - it was an eye-opener. If you can stomach the self-righteous polemics, it's a useful book.
Reviewed in January, 2000
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The Ultimate Rush, by Joe Quirk
Paperback, St. Martin's Press, 1999, $6.99, 400 pages
 Chet Griffin is a twenty-something. living-on-the-edge pierced and tattooed, rollerblading courier. He harbors a secret crush on a lesbian bass player/daycare worker, and his best friend and next-door neighbor is Danny, a paraplegic programmer. He sleeps naked with a boa constrictor wrapped around his torso, lives on sugar and is on federal probation for computer hacking. His life is about to turn weird. When his boss pays him a bundle to deliver computer disks, he's marked as the fall guy in a battle involving Chinese and Italian Mafiosi, corrupt San Francisco police officers and investment bankers. Chet pieces together the pieces of a lethal insider-trading scam and figures that the only way to get out alive is to expose the criminals.
Once Chet is lured back into hacking there's no stopping him. He worms his way into hacker bulletin boards, go head-to-head with arch enemy MP Phred (feared to be a fed), breaks the code on scrambled disks, phreaks the phone company and taps into his boss's computer. There is enough techo-minutiae to keep even the most die-hard geek happy. The chase and escape scenes are awesome. If I hadn't already destroyed my knees playing volleyball, I would have rushed out to buy a pair of inline skates to try the bit where he leaps over a car door. The writing was excellent, even poetic at times, but be forewarned that the character's alternative lifestyles are described in sordid detail. The outrageous characters come across as touchingly vulnerable and naïve. This was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Recommended.
Reviewed in February, 2000
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Digital Fortress,
by Dan Brown
Hardback, St. Martin's Press, 1998, 373 pages, $24.95
 A fired National Security Agency cryptographer, distressed at the NSA's ability to intercept and decode everyone's e-mail, claims that he has developed an unbreakable cryptographic privacy algorithm. He threatens to unleash it unless NSA admits that it has developed a secret supercomputer capable of breaking all other encryption schemes with brute force. Head cryptographer Susan Fletcher is called in to track down a suspected duplicate key, while her fiancée, a linguistics professor, is dispatched on a mission to Seville to recover the original key. Surrounded by intrigue, betrayed by those they trust most, the country's intelligence databases are within seconds of being penetrated when they crack the code.
The first edition of Digital Fortress sold out in nine days and was in its fourth printing within six weeks. Published two years ago, it has yet to be released in paperback It has been the #1 nationally best selling E-book for 15 weeks. In other words, this is a very popular and successful book, and with reason. The technical aspects are engrossing, with detail about computers-based code breaking and virus tracking, blocking and recovery. There's fast paced action, but I cracked the code before the NSA geniuses figured it out. The author's web site, www.digitalfortress.com, has lots of supplementary material and is worth a visit. Highly recommended.
Reviewed in February, 2000
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murder @maggody.com,
by Joan Hess
Hardback, Simon and Schuster, 2000, 253 pages, $22.00
 The town of Maggody, Arkansas (pop. 755) spins into a tizzy when they get a government grant to wire the town for the Internet. Ruby Bee wants to post her diner's menu on the Web, Brother Verber of the Voice of the Almighty God Assembly Hall has visions of setting up a cyber shopping cart to salvation and folks are speculating that the local moonshiner is ordering is mason jars over the 'Net . They worry about the specter of pornography entering their town, but the grad student hired to administer the network assures them that he can block all the nasties. He can't. A young mother is murdered, naked pictures of the town worthies are slithering around on e-mail and it's up to sheriff Arly Hanks to sort it all out.
This is the 12th of Joan Hess's Maggody books, and her rowdy rural humor is wildly popular among mystery readers. I am not a Maggody fan (although I do enjoy her Claire Malloy mysteries), finding the plots weak and the humor grating. It does give an accurate and sympathetic picture of what happens when a community too small for even cable TV plugs into cyberspace. Maggody groupies will love it.
Reviewed in March, 2000
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Coffin's Got the Dead Guy on the Inside,
By Keith Snyder
Paperback, 1999, Walker and Co, 287 pages, $5.99
 Struggling electronic musician Jason Keltner is so engrossed with composing a music fragment that he forgot to earn the rent money, so when spymaster Norton Platt offers him big bucks to baby sit a computer geek he reluctantly signs up for the job. There is a murder during their first outing, and the bad guys suspect that he swiped a mysterious "dongle" needed to crack the code for a new compression technology that will revolutionize computer games.
The title refers to an old joke about musicians: "What's the difference between a cello and a coffin? The coffin's got the dead guy on the inside." The writing is fast-paced and funny, the plot wacky, and the characters appealing. I only knew of dongles as the easily lost and breakable appendages to laptop modems, but apparently they can serve other purposes (I won't give it away.) This fun book - the Three Stooges meet the Maltese Falcon - will probably appeal most to a 20-something audience, but it's well worth reading.
Reviewed in March, 2000
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Sprinter,
by Bruce Jones
Paperback, Signet, 1998, 340 pages, $5.99
 Former ATF agent Jeri Starbuck, fired after Waco, is working off her angst running marathons and directing a children's AIDS hospice. Her new life is shattered when a psychopathic bomber turns her into his reluctant pawn with hints that her murdered daughter still lives. The bomber has taken over government databases through his control of the Sprinter 9000, an exploding spy chip originally developed by the FBI that has entered the consumer computer market with a bang. Jeri literally sprints around the San Diego following the bomber's ruthless instructions to stop Sprinter before California explodes.
Sprinter has made for TV movie written all over it - picture a young heroine with long legs and body-hugging spandex pitted against pure techo-evil. Sprinter 9000 is a plausible next-step in computing (well, not the exploding bits…) and it's a nice touch when the feds bribe thousands of hackers attending a local convention with $3,000 and a subscription to the CyberTimes to beat the clock and break the bomber's code. If you like lots of action, this fast-paced novel will keep you guessing until the end.
Reviewed in April, 2000
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Virus, by Bill Buchanan
Paperback, Jove Books, 1997, 432 pages, $6.50
 It's 2014 and our military defense is launched into space. Just as the Air Force is about to test a new technology that will make stealth missiles obsolete, Saddam Hussein's successors infest the main military computers with an intelligent virus called PAM that paralyzes U.S. defenses.
The literary quality of this book is abysmal. I have been trying to wade through it for a year and confess that it is the only one of the forty-plus books that I have reviewed that I skimmed, rather than read. I just couldn't stick it. The amount of technical detail is immense and apparently well researched. If you like lots and lots and lots of techno-babble, including charts and snippets of code, you will like this book. Otherwise, skip it. The detail on viruses is impressive.
Reviewed in April, 2000
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Timeline,
by Michael Crichton
Hardcover, Random House, 1999, 449 pages, $26.95
 Three young historians go back in time to rescue their professor, who is stuck in 14th-century France after a botched teleportation. Physicists - and avid geeks - will enjoy the use of Quantum technology applied to time travel: "faxing" people through quantum foam wormholes. In the real world, Quantum teleportation has succeeded in a laboratory setting, although only through space, not through time. In this near-future world, computers the size of a molecule are thousands of times more powerful than computers today, and can transfer information between two points without wires or networks. Crichton's science has often been prophetic - Jurassic Park hit the bookstalls and the movie theaters just a few years before real scientists cloned Dolly, the sheep. Even Crichton admits that this premise is implausible, but it is entertaining, and sent me scrambling to the Internet to learn more about Quantum technology. The movie rights were contracted even before the book was completed, and a computer game is due for release this year. I found the medieval history more interesting than the science, but it's a good, fast read that will keep you entertained and get you thinking.
Reviewed in June, 2000
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Butterfly Lost,
by David Cole
Paperback, Harper Mystery, 1999, 373 pages, $5.99
 Laura Winslow is a part-Hopi Ritalin junkie who moved back to Arizona to work as an "information midwife" for a bounty hunter. She lives in a trailer near the reservation where she was raised and hacks into computer systems to track down fugitives. She's good at it - she's a fugitive herself. When her business partner goes off on a tangent trying to track down a horse mutilator, she reluctantly accepts a case of her own tracking down a young girl whose grandfather thinks she has been abducted by Navaho skinwalkers. Dragged away from her safe computers into the real world, she's forced to confront her troubled past to catch a killer before he strikes again.
Tony Hillerman fans will feel right at home with Butterfly Lost. Laura is a compelling heroine and her computers are a running theme throughout the book, although the Native American plot overshadows the technical details. David Cole is the founder of the Internet's award-winning NativeWeb. This is his first novel. I hope there are more.
Reviewed in June, 2000
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The Truth Machine, by James L. Halperin
Paperback, DelRay, 1997, 394 pages, $6.99
When he is five, Pete Armstrong's beloved younger brother Leonard was abducted and killed by a recently paroled sociopath. While a student at Harvard, the haunted young genius vows to develop a truth machine that can detect with 100% accuracy truth and falsehood, to prevent such unreformed killers from ever being released from prison again. The action stretches from 1991 through 2050. Pete graduates from Harvard, invents his truth machine and becomes the richest man in the world. Along the way he harbors a terrible secret that only he, of all the people in the world, has the power to hide and which, if discovered, could cost him his life and all the good he has worked for.
Of all the computer crime books I have read, this is the only one that claims to have been written by a computer. This novel is speculative fiction, envisioning a future where technology has changed every aspect of our lives, with a special emphasis on the truth machine and its impact on the criminal justice system. This is an accessible, provocative, issue-oriented book that forces you to confront the future on its own terms. This is a first novel for Dallas-based Halperin. It's become a cult favorite and I recommend it. He maintains a web site at www.truthmachine.com where you can read sample chapters and cast your vote on the wisdom of really building an infallible lie detector.
Reviewed in July, 2000
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Nancy Drew: The E-Mail Mystery, by Carolyn Keene
Paperback, Pocket Books/Minstrel, 1998, $3.99, 148 pages
 Carson Drew has a slew of clients who, against their best interests, abruptly decide to settle out of court. Nancy, hired as a summer temp to clean up old case files from her father's law office, snoops around looking for an answer to this puzzle. She stumbles across an e-mail log that indicates that one of the firm's employees may be leaking privileged information to a rival firm and pokes around in computer files, chat rooms and cyber cafes to unmask the culprit.
This isn't your grandmother's Nancy Drew. The yellow roadster, old-fashioned even when I read the books in the early 1960s, has become a blue Mustang, Dad's secretary has evolved into "Ms" Hanson, and Nancy has taken up running, complete with Nikes and a Walkman. The computer details are basic, but right on the mark, covering elementary corporate security and chat room etiquette. Gal pal Bess might need help with her growing Internet addiction and there seems to be a cyber café on every street corner in River Heights. When I was a kid I read every Nancy Drew Mystery about ten times. Look where it got me! The E-Mail Mystery would make a perfect gift for a pre-teen girl or a delightful trip down memory lane for more mature Nancy fans.
Reviewed in July, 2000
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Y2K, by R.J. Pinero
Paperback, Tor Books, 1999, 384 pages, $6.99
 CIA field agent Kate Donaldson resigns rather than take the fall for a badly botched mission to protect the participants in a Y2K conference in London. She moves to Austin, opens a high tech security firm and is soon entangled with the same terrorists that ended her legendary 19-year career. Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic is determined to exploit the Y2K bug to extort money from developed nations. One of Kate's clients - and new romantic interest - has developed a program that can ferret out two-digit dates and fix them. The Serbs steal the program with the intent of un-fixing the fixes. She battles ruthless killers in Austin and Belgrade to save her sweetie and keep the powerful and dangerous software out of terrorist hands.
I breathed a huge sigh of relief on January second - never again would I have to read another Y2K thriller. Pineiro's latest kept beckoning me from the bookshelf, though, and I'm glad I succumbed. The explanation of the Y2K problem is impeccable, and reminded me that because of the "windowing" techniques that patch rather than fix many programs, Y2K ain't over 'til it's over. His high tech terrorist scenario is plausible and frightening. There are several harrowing descriptions of Serbian torture techniques that are not for the faint-hearted. You will learn how to say "thank-you," "I'm sorry" and "rape" in Serbo-Croatian. Austin-based AMD employee Piniero always offers a fun and fast-paced thriller, and in Y2K he gives Alamo PC members a bonus with a San Antonio-born heroine.
Reviewed in August, 2000
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Foolproof,
by Dianne Pugh
Paperback, Pocket Star Books, 1998, 514 pages, $6.99
 Bridget and Kip Cross disagree about the future of Pandora Software, their cutting-edge game company. Bridget wants to take it public; Kip just wants to program the latest Slade Slayer scenario and sleep with 5-year-old Brianna's nanny. However you slice it, Bridget will win - she's the majority stockholder. But not for long. She's brutally murdered, Kip is pegged by the cops as the chief suspect and their traumatized daughter is the only witness. Broker Iris Thorne is appointed trustee of little Brianna's shares. Is the murderer the cutthroat venture capitalist, a sinister media watchdog group, one of Kip's bimbos or Kip himself?
Although the technical details are skimpy, video game shoot-em-up culture is a running theme throughout the book. You'll get some amusing insights into how a computer game is developed and how the companies producing them are financed. The characters are amusing, the plot twisty and the writing competent. A good book to read on the beach.
Reviewed in August, 2000
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Interface,
by Stephen Bury
Paperback, Bantam Books, 1995, $6.50, 632 pages
 Illinois governor and all-around good guy Willy Cozzano has a stroke while watching the State of the Union Address. The president is threatening to forgive the national debt. The Network, an international cabal of investors who are holding the notes on most of the deficit, isn't too happy either. They maneuver the governor into having an experimental biochip implanted in his head, which promises to connect with the healthy portion of his brain and restore full functions. What they don't let on is that they control the chip. The Network engineers a presidential bid for the seemingly recovered Willy and hires a ruthless political pollster to covertly control the campaign via radio waves beamed into the candidate's head.
The plot sounds corny, but this is one of the best books of any genre that I've read in years. The unforgettable characters are fully developed and totally believable. The writing is excellent, reminiscent of Tom Wolfe. The technical details are accurate and unobtrusive. The real strength of this book, however, is in the political satire. It cuts close to the bone in the battle between the win-at-any-cost ethos versus integrity. Highly recommended reading in this election year.
Reviewed in September, 2000
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The Chaos Protocol,
by Nancy J. McKibbin
Paperback, Malmesbury Books, 356 pages, 1999, $19.95
 Annette is a beautiful, intense Y2K manager being courted by two men. Leo, besotted with Annette, abandoned a challenging job with a top company to slog through bank code, just to be near her. Volodya, a Russian émigré, charmed himself and his crew into a major contract. Someone has used the chaos surrounding Y2K remediation to introduce a computer worm into the banking system and Annette's two likable suitors are the most likely culprits.
I have sworn - several times - never to review another Y2K thriller. I lied. As a thriller, it's not very thrilling. After mulling over my dissatisfaction for a few days I came up with the reason - it's really a romance! However, the technical details are the best of any of the Y2K books I've read. This book contains the first understandable explanation of a worm that I've ever seen, and its description of the Y2K problem and solutions are right on target. It's worth a few hours if you stumble upon it but don't you dare shell out $20 for this so-so paperback.
Reviewed in September, 2000
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Hard Time,
by Sara Paretsky
Hardcover, Delacorte Press, 1999, 385 pages, $24.95
 When private investigator V.I Warshawski stops to help an injured woman abandoned on the Chicago streets, the police try to frame her for a hit and run. To protect herself, she starts snooping into the young Filipina nanny-turned-prisoner's life. As she closes in on the city's biggest security firm, crooked cops, a global entertainment empire, a state senator and a woman's prison she becomes a prisoner herself and draws on deep reserves of courage and compassion to clear her name and expose corruption.
This long-awaited novel is Paretsky's ninth in the series but the first since 1994. The haunting prison details are based on a Human Right's Watch report on women's prisons and are horrifying. Computers, although not taking center stage, crunch their data throughout the novel. An online service, Life Stories, is used by everyone to dig up the dirt on everyone else. The discipline of backing up her data every night helps Warshawski keep an innocent man from being framed. And, in the end, cracking the obvious e-mail password of someone who should have known better brings the whole evil shebang to a halt. Highly recommended - the paperback will be released later this month.
Reviewed in October, 2000
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The Empress File,
by John Sanford
Paperback, Berkley Pub Group; 368 pages, 1991 (reissue), $7.99
A small town cop with an itchy trigger finger and a new machine gun takes down a 14-year-old computer genius, mistaking his bag of rocky road ice cream for a snatched purse. The black citizens of the sleepy Mississippi Delta town decide enough is enough and call in Kidd, an artist who fills in the dead time with a spot of tarot card reading, burglary, mayhem and computer hacking. He and his sometime lover, LuEllen, use their computer skills to sting the corrupt mayor and town council . . . and snap up a bit of much needed cash on the side.
My copy of this book is so old that the author appears under his real name, John Camp, instead of his more famous pseudonym, best-selling author John Sanford. Fans of Sanford's "Prey" books will find this one to be more of a caper than a thriller, with crackling dialog and a fast-moving plot. In this pre-Internet era, most of the computer action involves BBSs and hacking. This is the second in a series - "Fool's Run" was the first. The third book, The Devil's Code, just hit the shelves in October. Before you grab the sure-to-be bestseller, catch up on the prequels.
Reviewed in October, 2000
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Tender Malice,
by Catherine Lanigan
Paperback, Mira Books, 377 pages, 1999, $5.99
 Hill Country geek girl Karen Curie lives at home with Dad, never had a date and works as a code monkey in an Austin high tech firm. This changes overnight when she enters the final keystroke in her own foolproof computer security program, Mastermind. She quits her job, moves into town with a glamorous roommate, is pursued by two gorgeous guys and sells her program for billions. A dream come true? Not quite. One of the boyfriends is out to steal her life's work, but which one is it?
Did I mention that this is romantic suspense? Or did you figure that out on your own? If you can get through the young-virgin-in-peril subplot without gagging, the computer minutia is intriguing. Mastermind goes around the atoms in a firewall (do firewalls have atoms?) and reprograms itself after each chess-like move so it can't be traced. One of the key clues is altered colors on the Windows display. It's a good book of its type, but not my type.
Reviewed in November, 2000
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Fire Cracker, by Shirley Kennett
Paperback, Pinnacle Books, 1997, 327 pages, $5.99
Billy faked his death when his was 15 and reemerged as "Cracker," bent on revenge against the stepmother he wrongly thinks killed his father ten years before. Now in his early 20s, he hacks into the computer system of the hospital where his stepmother works as a doctor and alters online records, bumping off three patients and pointing the finger at "Mama Elly." PJ Gray and her virtual reality homicide simulation team at the St. Louis Police Department are called in to reconstruct the crime s and trap the killer before he strikes again.
Reviewed in November, 2000
Raw Data, by Sally Chapman
Paperback (out of print), St. Martin's Press, 1991, 250 pages, $3.99
It's not bad enough that ICI program manager Julie Blake finds the dead body of her top analyst stashed away in her computer: soon after, she's told that someone is selling data from her top-secret biological memory chip project to the Russians. Vic Paoli, an obnoxious techie from the National Security Agency, is flown in to solve the leaks and the two of them reluctantly team up to save the project and prevent more murders.
This is the first in the series of "Julie and Vic" mysteries by Austin native Sally Chapman, and I think it was the best of the bunch (the latest, Hardwired, reviewed last April, was flimsy.) The technical details are very good, mostly about the procedures used in finding a security hole. If you have ever programmed in a language that uses base 16 you will instantly catch onto an important clue. The story is well plotted and the characters are engaging. Worth picking up if you can find it in a used bookstore or the library.
This book crackles with computer details. The virtual reality modeling of crimes is a fantastic concept - I wonder if anyone is really doing it? The cracker details are awesome - I loved the idea of covering up a back door into a system by disguising the loophole as a bad sector on the hard disk so that it wasn't removed even when the disk was reformatted. Kennett did make one boo-boo. She mistakenly referred to Easter Eggs (programmer jokes in standard software that are triggered by complicated keystroke combinations) as cookies (digital markers placed on the hard drives of Internet users so marketers can track their cyber travels.) Nobody's perfect. Some gratuitous sex. The recurring characters are interesting a well drawn. Second in a series of three books; recommended.
Reviewed in December, 2000
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The Sacred Disc,
by Charles West
Paperback, Salvo Press, April, 2000, 192 pages, $12.95
Holy hard drives! Baba and Yogi from the Eternal Truth Temple hire Fisher, the accidental owner of a detective agency, to track down an irreplaceable stolen computer disk that contains the sacred writings of their cult. This is only his second case (the first was tracking down a Seventh Day Adventist who absconded with the church funds and was found in Las Vegas eating meat on Saturday.) Fisher is set adrift among dead bodies and Colombian drug lords but manages to crack the case before it cracks him.
The computer details are peripheral - just the stolen sacred disk, which turns out to contain the hidden accounts of a drug-running scam - but the novel is a gem. The writing is very, very funny and the nutty California ensemble is a delight. The plot is twisty and fast paced (I read the whole book in less than an hour) and makes sly mockery of the entire hard-boiled detective genre. Recommended.
Reviewed in December, 2000
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The Devil's Code,
by John Sandford
Hardback, Putnam, October, 2000, 321 pages $25.95
After a ten-year hiatus, Kidd's back A cryptic message a murdered colleague left for Kidd sets him on the trail with gal pal LuEllen and hacker buddy Bobby in search of a clutch of hidden Jaz disks. Kidd is soon alerted that he has been falsely fingered as a member of "Firewall," a group of rogue hackers that has been disrupting government services. All roads lead to a sinister contractor ostensibly working on the Clipper Chip but snatching and selling classified satellite photos to foreign governments on the sly. Kidd has to solve the crime to save his life and it wouldn't ruin his day if he made a little money on the side.
This is geek writing at its finest. Fans of Sanford's "Prey" books might get frustrated at the leisurely pace of this laid back caper, but the technical details are believable and intriguing. When the sister of a recently murdered colleague drops in on Kidd, he's crouched on the floor stringing together recycled PCs, networking them into a super computer. There are also hackers, denial of service attacks, cryptic disks, government security, telephone phreaking and computer bulletin boards -- you name it, it's here. Although I enjoyed this book, wait for the paperback. It's good, but not a hardback keeper.
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