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Book Review of The Blue Nowhere

The Blue Nowhere
reviewed on + 106 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1


This is the first Deaver novel I've read, but it certainly won't be the last. It's fast-paced, and not cluttered with unnecessary characters. An entertaining thriller that's hard to put down.

An engrossing thriller for the electronic age, packed with action, surprises, and adventure. Deaver's killer reaches inside his victims' minds, learns their deepest fears and vulnerabilities, and uses that knowledge to gain access to them. Phate is a techno-genius who has devised a method of invading individual computers and gaining admittance to all the files stored there, including e-mail. Worse, he is gaining "access" to his victims before he kills in what to him is just a real-world virtual-reality game. Faced with an electronics sociopath, the California State Police Computer Crimes Division "borrows" a jailed hacker to help them follow the complex electronic trail of the perpetrator. Wyatt, still facing a year of his prison sentence for ostensibly cracking a Defense Department code, is more than happy to be back online and on the trail of the killer hacker or "kracker." Readers are led to wonder if Wyatt, along with a number of the other characters, is what he appears to be. Besides being an engrossing mystery with lots of interesting characters, The Blue Nowhere is an absorbing history lesson about the Internet, a dictionary of computer terminology, and a compelling, if frightening, description of what is possible, and maybe probable, in our electronically based future.