Rating: WARTY!
Read by Dennis Boutsikaris, this audio book went nowhere for me. The reading wasn't very inspired and the subject matter was boring, so I think this is the last Deaver I'm going to read, too. I didn't like his take on James Bond, and that really takes some skill to be able to write a James Bond novel and make it suck. I couldn't do it.
The premise here is that there's a hacker who is also a serial killer. He hacks into his victim's computers and spies on them, learning all about them, which enables him to socially engineer his way into close proximity - because it's all about feeling them tremble as he knifes them. He sees them as characters in a vast computer game, nothing more.
Naturally the police free a hacker from jail to counteract the exceptional skills of their perp, but the levels of incompetence and thoughtlessness these people routinely display is a caricature. The counter-hacker and the police department's own computer experts are scary in their cluelessness, and it's actually insulting to these people. I honestly don't believe they don't have better people than this working in law enforcement. It's also a very male-centric story, with women just put in as victims or set decoration, so it wasn't really very interesting there, either.
I made it through three of the five or six disks and decided there are better books waiting for me and life's too short. This was too much Jeffrey showing off how much he'd read about hacking, and not thinking things through properly. No wonder it's so short.
