- Title:
- Invasion of Privacy (Brody Taylor Thrillers, #2)
- By:
- Ian Sutherland
- Pages:
- 472
- Rating:
- 5
Your private life is streamed live to a global audience. But no one told you about the cameras hidden in your home. And now a killer is watching, learning, planning…
Jenny Price, talented and ambitious police detective, leads the investigation into the murder of a beautiful young cellist. Baffled by the killer’s intimate knowledge of the girl’s dreams and desires the case begins to run out of steam.
Out of leads, Jenny reluctantly accepts the aid of attractive but mysterious witness Brody Taylor, who has come forward with a bizarre story about webcams hidden in thousands of homes across the country. But Jenny is unaware that the charming Brody is under cover on his own covert operation.
An up-to-the-minute crime thriller that exposes the dark side of the connected world in which we now live.
This is one of the most intense weeks I’ve ever read about. Sutherland deftly weaves dramatic, Humanly plausible police procedure with very high-level hackery to form a novel both intricately plotted and meticulously produced. He makes the note, in his about the author section, that the book is “professionally published”. I cannot of course see the book cover, but judging on the content rather than the layout this certainly holds sway. The writing flowed free of errors or misspelling, the book feeling professionally edited to a standard above and beyond that of any one of the big houses. The characters were bold and real, the timeframe of the book compressing events into a hectic, headrush of a week that I cannot believe only took me four and a half hours to read. It felt so much longer, considerably more real. I could see this forming one of those five-day long dramas ITV have shown over the last few years, although it would probably need some creative adaptation to get into Brody’s head (maybe he could narrate).
When I say high hackery, I don’t just mean mentioning of an iPad: the stuff here goes way beyond the Surface (pardon the Pun) and explores the deep, dark, gritty end of both morality and technology as they stand today. No novel I have read this year (this is the 140th), or indeed no novel I have read published in the last 4 years (currently 246) explore both with such compellingly powerful detail nor such accurate yet accessible way of discussing technology.
It’s a little late to pick up another work right now, but I have just procured the prequel novella and, tomorrow, will be subscribing to the author’s newsletter. To you, mr Sutherland, I say this: Keep doing what you’ve done, you’re on to a winning formula. Your characters, your technology and your plots fall into harmony with perfection. The twists are credible, yet not always obvious (I missed the ring), and your publication and quality is first rate. Your prices are more than reasonable, your tone authentic and the sky’s the limit for such a complex character.