- Title:
- Spyware
- By:
- B.V. Larson
- Pages:
- 214
- Rating:
- 2
What if the entire Internet went down… At once?
The world believes Ray Vance released the worst computer virus in history. The virus adapts and evolves like a biological creature in order to survive. Many believe it is a new life form, but one designed with an evil purpose. As the sun sets on our technological world and the entire Internet shuts down, Vance runs from the feds. He must save his family, stop the virus… and stay alive.
This Technothriller is a full 71,000 word long novel, by award-winning author B. V. Larson.
This book started out with potential. it had a nice cover. It even had a good synopsis – but that’s about where the goodness ended.
The author seemed to delight in making up words: “crumped” for instance, appeared 4 times. Furthermore, although a lot of the computer material was accurate, Larson seems happy to drop great clangers to suit his story. For example, a duo of elite hackers are able to bypass a BIOS password by shorting the CMOS battery, but struggle to unpack a password-protected Zip file they have complete file system access to.
The story makes large of a countdown, starting at a hundred hours and decreasing throughout the novel. One might expect the heros to foil the plot just in the nick of time, or else for the countdown to reach its end and to have devistating results. One paragraph dedicated to the aftermath of the countdown from a novel this size is not really much to write home about and made the entire book pretty much pointless.
And then there’s the way the book just ends, one action-packed scene of tension and drama which you expect to lead to a great, exciting … nothingness. Oh, well. Plenty more fish in the sea.