James Kolinsky. Scholarship wrestler. Math major. A techie.
Busted out of a number of failed startups. Specialist is digital security. Gets
married (to a woman estranged from her oil roughneck father). Fathers two
little girls. Accepts a job at CompTec. A company that backs up information in
massive server farms. The biggest and best in the business. And James is at the
center of its security. Not the head dog. A doer. A drone. Reliable. 10 years. Raleigh,
North Carolina.
Five big shots: the COO of CompTec, a Russian mobster, a
Chinese warlord, a British financier, a Zurich banker. They work up a scheme.
Crash the financial networks for 24 hours, during which they transfer as much
money as they can. Estimates are upwards of $60 billion each. To be successful,
they need to find a patsy. A nobody who they can plant bread crumbs that will
lead investigators on a trail to the patsy. A disgruntled employee whose
revenge against the company is to crash the financial network. Has to have the
technical savvy for the trail to be believable.
James Kolinsky.
Overnight, credit cards, ATMs, most bank computers all seize up.
The only money you have is what’s in your pocket. And the public freaks all over the planet.
Kolinsky is in a panic when he checks his balance online and finds that the
process of draining his accounts has started. Cell phones are jammed. He has to
get home, but a subordinate says the problem may have originated in their own
server farm.
Ah, but his co-worker is one of ‘them’ and getting him into
the server farm is a ruse. While trying to trace the problem, Kolinsky manages
to trace the information flow and starts to form some suspicions.
Bad guys invade Kolinsky’s home, taking his wife and
children hostage. Her father, trying to make good with his daughter, wants to
make sure they are OK and drives up unannounced.
The bad guys soon learn . . . Kolinsky may be a drone, but
he can get a bit of an attitude when his family is threatened. He’s seen the
digital trail leading to the 5 guys driving this havoc. So he sends them a
little gift; a simple virus. Then he’s off to get to his family.
Think I came across this title from Goodreads.com. A little
bit of Hitchcock’s wrong man theme, a little bit of Die Hard. A whole lot of
detail about cyber-crime, hackers, and digital storage. Despite how dull that
might sound, Buschi makes it cook. An amazingly fast read that was consistently
4 of 5 stars on other review sites. This was a story of a single day, and what
a day it was. Kindled his next book and I can’t wait to get at it, and it's rated even higher. A very worthy diversion for those
needing a diversion. Trust me.
East Coast Don
There is an excellent review by East Coast Don in the blog, and when I had a limited amount of time and was looking for a diversion, this was the book I chose – great choice. In this techy-based crime novel, Buschi immediately makes James Kolinsky a compelling character about whom this reader cared about and could identify with. The novel is action-driven from page one and I couldn’t put it down. I’ve already acquired the next Buschi novel – ‘nuf said.
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