The Blue Nowhere

“When a sadistic hacker, code-named Phate, sets his sights on Silicon Valley, his victims never know what hit them. He infiltrates their computers, invades their lives, and lures them to their deaths. To Phate, each murder is like a big, challenging computer hack: every time he succeeds, he must challenge himself anew— by taking his methodology to a higher level, and aiming at bigger targets.”

Okay—I stole that from Jeffery Deaver’s The Blue Nowhere site.  The gist of The Blue Nowhere is that this murderous madman has to be stopped by an unlikely team: a jailed hacker, a homicide detective and a few geeky cops (set in Silicon Valley, you would think it possible to have geeky cops.  No comment about the likeliness of that scenario).  Sounds formulaic, doesn’t it?  It’s not.  For one thing, it is technically utterly accurate without over-explaining tech stuff.  For another, the plot is so full of twists and turns that I can’t remember being able to successfully predict where the plot was going.

Honestly, I haven’t been able to say that very often in the last twenty years.

The combination of page-turning suspense, believable characters and a technical story that could conceivably be real is so unusual I would have to recommend it to anyone who reads fiction of any kind.  As a case in point, I myself prefer science fiction, history and comedy.  I don’t tend to read mysteries at all, since Raymond Chandler died.  I don’t think I ever read a police story before.

Jeffery Deaver also wrote The Bone Collector (A Lincoln Rhyme Novel) which is probably his most famous work, since it got a movie treatment (The Bone Collector [HD DVD]).

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