Reamde by Neal Stephenson

A damned good book which held my interest despite being filled with reality-simulating levels of detail, Reamde is the tale of an adopted Eritrean woman kidnapped by Russian gangsters from Seattle to find a virus writer in China holding Russian information for ransom.  The Russian’s revenge is interrupted by the woman sending him on a wild goose chase with amazingly bad results.

Like many of his novels, Reamde is real enough that it might well have happened, or might happen tomorrow (see also The Baroque Cycle collection of novels). However, “…while recognizably Stephensonian, Reamde is less about the flow of information through global networks than it is about the flow of bullets out of guns. This is, first and foremost, a Bourne-style international thriller, and as such its intellectual sites are set lower than those of its immediate predecessors. “ — Lev Grossman, Time (I wish I had the time to write a crashingly great review like Mr. Grossman’s.  Read it here).

In Audible’s amazingly bad way, the very-cheap-for-them-to-deliver version is more expensive than the expensive-to-manufacture-and-mail version on CD, at least on Amazon Prime.  Idiots.