Jasmine Virk Virk itibaren Texas itibaren Texas

I received a copy of this from a GoodReads giveaway, and I was really excited to get it, since I do like a good technothriller, and the initial description seemed promising. The general plot idea is that there is this virus (maybe one, maybe more--it's a very sneaky virus!) wreaking havoc on computer systems in the U.S. The opening chapters describe various catastrophes due to fully automated systems shutting down and locking out human users--a nuclear power plant's cooling system suddenly goes offline (I felt rather uncomfortable reading about this--but of course, the author couldn't have known what was going to happen in Japan), a 787's navigation and flight systems refuse to respond to the pilots and the plane plunges in a death dive toward the ocean. Call in specialist Jeff Aiken. Computer code genius extraordinaire, Russinovich attempts to inject a bit a pathos into his life story by having his fiancée die in the Twin Towers attack. And (cue the internal struggle) Jeff could have prevented it! He found all the evidence of an attack on 9/11/01 by Al Qaida, but his bosses thought it wasn't important, and now he is wracked with guilt (character depth? Ha!) over the whole mess. So he left government work, boldly striking out on his own as a sort of computer systems savior. He's called in by an investment company to figure out why all of their computer data just disappeared, and why they can't reboot their systems. Here he meets Sue, who is quite possibly one of the most offensively stereotypical characters I've ever encountered. She's Asian, she's hot, she's brilliant, and her online handle is ... Dragon Lady. Seriously. Are you kidding me???? Excuse me while I take a *headdesk*. Ah, thanks. Cut to the DHS, cyber terrorism dept., and wait for the entrance of yet another totally improbable character: Daryl Haugen (whom I kept referring to in my brain as Daryl Hannah for the ENTIRE BOOK!). She, too, is totally smokin', men falling all over themselves to check her out and try and get her in their beds *sigh*. Oh yeah, she speaks like five different languages, went to college as a pre-teen, finished Stanford by 19, and is generally some sort of superwoman. She's also totally sweet and not stuck up at all. Oh, boy. So it's not good enough for women to feel all this societal pressure to conform to supermodel beauty standards? We also have to be savants? Classy, Russinovich, very classy. Anyway, so now that we've met (most) of our main characters, the story chugs along. And gets weirder, and weirder, and weirder. At one point, Osama bin Laden makes a cameo appearance (bizarre note: I read this passage one day before his death was reported). There are clandestine meetings in Paris, a corrupt government official who allies himself with extremists in order to line his pockets (hmm), a brilliant Russian hacker, etc. etc. Basically, heaps of clichés. In the end, the plot boils down to: blame it on extremists from the Middle East starting a cyber jihad and the Russians. After finishing the "Hi, I'm Osama bin Laden! Welcome to my cave!" passage, I came here on GoodReads and found out that in fact, Russinovich is some former bigwig at Microsoft. *Plink* Did you hear that? That was the final piece of the puzzle falling into place. See, as a Mac user, I was wondering why the author only referred to HP and Dell as the major players in the computer industry. Why didn't anyone have smartphones? What about tablets? Wouldn't those be great ways to disseminate a virus? Aha! Mr. Microsoft didn't want to touch Apple with a ten-foot pole. So all of that tech that Apple is really known for is conveniently left out of the book, thus making it practically obsolete at the time of its printing. I really couldn't in good faith recommend this to anyone.