Customer Reviews

The Blue Nowhere

5 star:		(89)
4 star:		(49)
3 star:		(32)
2 star:		(17)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

This book surprised me on many levels, and I start by saying that I highly recommend it. As a person who likes to savor books, I read this one in two evenings. After Speaking in Tongues, I was a little wary of getting excited about another Jeffery Deaver's book. But as a programmer, I decide to pick it up because it is about something I have an interest in. Wyatt Gillette, a convicted felon, and the California Computer Crimes Unit attempt to stop a man, and an unknown accomplice, who uses his computer for the ultimate evil: murder. Jeffery Deaver throws out a few curve balls to keep the reader guessing, but avoids the unbelievable twists that seem to be rampant in thrillers. Generally I find that hi-tech fictional works are usual laughable in their portrayal and explanations of the technologies involved. Along this line,I have long felt that Michael Crichton is one of the best authors in researching his topics. I was very pleasantly surprised to find that Mr. Deaver did a great job in his own; all-in-all, his events and explanations were realistic and they reflect his opinion that the reader is not stupid, without going so far as to be a textbook on the subject. It is a very fast moving book, and there are complaints that the characters are not deeply developed. I attribute this to two things. It would take away from the quick pace of the story, and furthermore it is unnecessary. You learn enough about Wyatt and Phate without needless filler. Don't get me wrong, there are a couple of spots where I crinkled my nose in disbelief, but it is a work of fiction and it is a very good one at that.

I have always enjoyed reading Jefferey Deaver, but after finishing The Blue Nowhere, I was thoroughly disappointed. The plot first seems compelling and interesting enough: a jailed hacker is freed to work with a detective to capture a dangerous person named Phate, who uses computers to kill people. Although the characters seemed interesting at first, I quickly realized there was absolutely no depth to any of them. The intentionally misspelled computer terms ("warez" or "phreaking") were very amusing. During most parts of the book, it seemed that Deaver had just done a large amount of research on the subject and then with no knowledge of the topic, he sloppily compiled it into a story. Yet, the major error of the book was the timeframe of the events of the plot. All of these major events occur within several days, which is entirely improbable considering the numerous murders that occurred during the novel. Bottom Line: The Blue Nowhere has a compelling storyline, but its numerous errors are the cause of its downfall. Check it out, but don't buy it.

From the moment I cracked this book, it became my downfall. I couldn't leave it, even for a few minutes, without longing for its fast-paced, utterly addictive plot. From the first paragraph to the last, this novel captured my imagination so fully that I wanted to skip meals and postpone sleep, much like the hackers portrayed in its pages.

The novel begins with the murder of a highly security conscious woman. From the first few pages, the reader knows this is no ordinary murder, although the chapters to come will reveal exactly how extraordinary the killer is. When the police suspect a skilled hacker who has taken his role-playing games into the real world, they enlist the aid of a convicted felon and "wizard" (an expert hacker) who is granted a temporary release from prison. At first glance, this is not a novel premise, but HOW the cracker accomplishes his murders elevates this story to the level of pure creepiness, reflecting the level of technology our society has acquired and our blind confidence in it. The killer's intelligence and intimate knowledge of code make him a particularly elusive and dangerous suspect.

Deaver's plot twists and turns so many times, giving false clues in the best spirit of genre and then dropping new ones, so the reader makes dozens of guesses about the outcome but probably will come up short. Although Deaver does make some clumsy moves (for example, dialogue often takes unnatural directions for the sake of exposition, and sometimes his facts are slightly off the mark) and can be repetitive, all in all his slips don't detract from this in-the-throat thriller. Yes, the characters aren't fully realized and verge on being types, but hey, you don't read this kind of book for characterizations. You read it to lose yourself in a suspenseful plot, and Deaver certainly delivers here. Deaver is such a good storyteller that he can make you both gullible and paranoid at the same time. Right now I can't even type this review without a hitch of doubt.

Next time your computer crashes, or your typing seems sluggish, or you meet someone in the street who looks vaguely familiar and who reminds you of who he is, you'll break out with little beads of sweat, wondering if the world really is how it appears. This residual effect is Deaver's greatest triumph.

Maybe it's because I've been in the computer business for 20 years that this book bothered me so much with it's inaccuracies. Since the plot of the book is based on interaction with computers, the computer terminology and capabilities are the primary basis for the action in the book.

Let me give you a few examples of inaccuracies: his referrals to "IBM clone". It must be 10 years since I've heard that term, who uses that anymore? "PC" or "Windows-Based" is the generally accepted connotation these days. Then there is the computer "wizard" who boots his computer to the "blinking C: prompt" - why does a wizard use DOS? Beats me. Okay, say he has his reasons (like when booting off a "boot disk"), in reality the C: prompt doesn't blink, the cursor does.

Not real serious (yet), how's this: the hacker who runs a DOS program called "Detective.exe" - first of all that's an invalid filename in DOS (it must be of the form 8.3 - meaning 8 letters maximum for the first part of the name) - even if it were valid, you don't have to type "Detective.exe" to start the program, "Detective" is enough. A true hacker would have called the program "d.exe" anyway, saving typing and not revealing the program's purpose by giving it an obvious title (see TRAPDOOR next). There is also the "TRAPDOOR" program (which Deaver erroneously calls a "virus"; a "trapdoor" is a way of entering a computer system and has nothing in common with a virus). This TRAPDOOR program asks questions to elicit an action from the user. This is a pretty lame program for a "wizard" to come up with. Using mouse detection one doesn't have to answer such questions - you click a button to start an action. When a hacker writes a program he makes it as cryptic as possible so if someone else stumbles across it they won't know what it's for or how to use it - you don't put in a MENU detailing it's (possible or probable illegal) actions!

I also had problems imagining how a convict assembles a computer without a monitor but with a modem, using only the odd parts he finds lying around his prison cell (and he's in solitary too).

I don't understand how a book that is so geared towards computers gets published without a real computer expert to check it out first. {I love the movie Jurassic Park, but the computer scenes make me cringe - this is a Spielberg production! What happened there? Was accuracy sacrificed for artistic license?)

Deaver throws around a lot of terms like "Linux" and "Unix", but he doesn't have the basics down. I won't even go into the more advanced technical problems with what the so-called expert hacker in the book does (for example, Deaver treats all computers as if they were servers directly connected to the internet). Maybe I'm a little sensitive here, after all I am a hacker, NOT a cracker, and I know the difference.

I was so turned off by the constant mistakes I gave up reading after 70 pages. I just couldn't get into story. I've enjoyed other thrillers from Deaver such as The Bone Collector, Hell's Kitchen, etc., but he's really off the mark with this one. I can't recommend it.

This is Jeffery Deaver's first venture into a cyberthriller and he does a pretty good job. The strength of the novel is its plot: a no-holds-barred contest between two hackers. Wyatt Gillette is doing time for a few minor computer crimes when he is offered a temporary reprieve if he helps the state police track down a murderous cracker called Phate. The plot takes one turn after another, building suspense as Phate searches for new victims and Gillette tries to stop him. Why is Phate committing these murders? Who is his partner? Who's the traitor within the police? Is Gillette really a good guy? Plenty of mystery and suspense to keep you turning the pages.

Although the plot is terrific, the story has a couple of weak points. Deaver is not a computer pro and it shows. Although many of the inaccuracies are minor - only a technically sophisticated person would notice - some of them were really ridiculous (Gillette's fingertips are so strong from fingertip pushups that they crush keyboards during coding sessions).

Another problem is that Phate turns out to be a stock character - I won't give away the details, but you could probably put together a description without reading the novel. It's too bad because he starts out as an interesting, mysterious adversary. Still, the Blue Nowhere is a good thriller, well worth reading.

Deaver my be able to lead novices into thinking that this story had something to do with real computer crime, but it didn't even pass the lowest standards of techncial knowledge of how cracking into systems really works, not to mention what you can and cannot do to a machine remotely over the Internet.

Let's get some things straight:

1) You cannot "rename your domain name" instantaniously like, rename CCU's domain to "caltourism.com". This would involve a third party registrar to update the root nameservers, which would take days to propagate fully. Furthermore, if CCU were an "autonomous system" (AS), it would take a lot longer yet, and require the approval of many parties, including ARIN.

2) A program that can find a user's actual computer online via their email address (Phate's cutsie Trapdoor program) would be so tedious to write, with so many complex, boring testcases for difficult-to-reproduce situations that I doubt anyone with the supposed talent to write such a program would be interested in wasting so much time in doing it. Solving the problems that Trapdoor would face prior to even connecting to the user's computer are about 10x the complexity of exploiting the weaknesses of the target computer itself. Crackers get their kicks in different ways than that.

3) Crackers do not write menu-driven applications. It's a waste of time for them.

There were many, many more technical sillinesses that aren't worth going into.

Most importantly, Deaver, pulling hysterics, would have us believe that we are taking our lives in our hands by using a computer. Nonsense. Always remember computer crime is about stealing information. Period. It's not about killing people or raping women or otherwise bringing bodily harm to the masses. If you don't store information that you can't afford to lose on your computer, then the worst thing you have to lose from a cracker is a little bit of time it takes to reinstall your system and apply the appropriate security updates. You have backups don't you? If not, you have more common problems than computer crime facing you in the future.

As a great Jeffrey Deaver fan, I can only say that it was difficult for me to believe that this particular piece of tripe was written by the author of "A Maiden's Grave," "The Bone Collector," "Praying for Sleep," etc. Deaver has written a few other not-too exciting books, but this one is a real snore. I wanted the inimitable Deaver serial killer novel; instead I got a bunch of drivel about the Internet, hacker terminology defined ad infinatum--and this stuff not even well woven into the novel. (What novel? More of an introductory course to the Internet. I don't even know if it's accurate, much less care.) By the way, Jeff, there are no muscles in the fingers. Only tendons, ligaments and bones, and soft tissue. One cannot have "muscular fingers," not even after a lifetime on the computer. I hope your knowledge of computer hacking is better than your knowledge of anatomy. Please, this was a pitiful effort. Have you gone senile? Knowing that your reputation is such that anything you write will carry you another two or three novels...I have nothing good to say about this book, except that it is nicely bound.

I enjoyed Deaver's other books, so at the airport, when the jacket promised a cyber-thriller, I excitedly bought this book. I should have put it down early on when Deaver was explaining how crackers stole some company's "source codes." By the time he had PCs crashing by having the operating systems changing their power supply settings (huh ?) it was too late. Anyone with an understanding of how computers, networks or crypto actually work should stay very far away from this novel.

Additionally, the who-dunnit aspect of the book got tiring as suspect after suspect was teed up and eliminated without giving the interested reader the information necessary to eliminate (or not) suspects. I felt the plot was spoon-fed to us far more than in the Kincaid novels.

I have to wonder two things out loud: 1] is his forensic and crime scene analysis information (something I have less domain expertise in) as riddled with factual errors as his computer/technology information and 2] how in the world did editors and publishers let this one out.

There are some people who are mediocre at what they do and then there are masters. Jeffrey Deaver is the master of suspense in my humble opinion. No one weaves a thriller together quite like he does. His latest novel, The Blue Nowhere, is no exception. Phate is a killer, a killer that finds out every intricate detail of his victim's life beforehand by snatching the root directory of their computers. He is a hacker, the best of the best, a wizard and there is only one person that can stop him: another wizard.

Wyatt Gillette is trying to quietly serve out his three-year sentence at a federal penitentiary for computer tampering. However, he jumps at the chance to help track down a killer when the local authorities arrange to get him released for 72 hours. He gets even more excited when he discovers that the killer is one of his old running buddies. Wyatt and Phate had founded The Knights of Access together, both geniuses in their own right. But there was one slight difference: Wyatt did it for fun, just to see if it could be done, and Phate did it for evil. So they parted ways and now it is time for them to have the ultimate showdown. Typing more than 100 words per minute, trying to outsmart each other, the police fade into the woodwork as they go after each other for vengeance, glory, and for the love of the game.

This is not a good novel. This is a great novel. If you have never experienced a Jeffrey Deaver ride, this is a good place to jump on the bandwagon.

What Deaver does with computers and the internet in The Blue Nowhere is pretty much what Peter Benchley did with sharks and the ocean in Jaws. As a computer specialist I was amused--and sometimes appalled--with Deaver's depiction of the cyber-world. He did get a lot of the history right and for people who are computer novices this book could provide-vicariously--some learning moments. Trouble is-same as with Benchley and the sharks-there's going to be a lot of unwarranted paranoia and dis-information spread about as well.
But let's forget that and look at the story . . . Initially the plot line is amusing, a cyber-criminal is brought out of prison by the police to help catch a much more deadly cyber-criminal. Push your suspension-of-disbelief lever ALL the way up as this progresses. Also see if you can contain your irritation with Deaver's continual, narrative explanations of computer terminology. Next we have to endure a heavy dose of soap opera (sons dying, wives leaving, daughters in pregnancy-extremis, wives in medical dilemma) as the search for the Komputer-Killer goes on. The characters are a bit beyond two dimensional-but not much.
The worst thing, however, is what Deaver does in the last quarter of the book-and, sadly, what he's done in at least two other of his works (to my knowledge). I refer to The Bone Collector and The Coffin Dancer, the other two Deaver novels I've read. In both of those he tells a very good story, then in the last part twists the plot so severely that any serious reader will throw up their hands. A French braid should be so simple. It's "the-guy-you-thought-was-a-good-guy-now-looks-like-a-bad-guy and the-bad-guy-might-actually-be-a-good-guy but maybe the good/bad-guy-is really-a-bad/good-guy".
He did that in both The Bone Collector and The Coffin Dancer-Damn I wish he'd stop it!