2011-08-28

Roadside Crosses

The back cover of Roadside Crosses starts with:
"On the Internet, you can never be sure who is listening. Anyone can discover your secrets, you deepest fears."

Okay, another scary-internet mystery. Politicians suffer a lot from Scary Internet Syndrome (have a read at Lauren Weinstein's Why governments are afraid of social media while you are at it). But it's a Jeffery Deaver story, so I dive it.

The stuff you would expect: minority people doing great jobs, incompetent bosses, an irritating blogger, drinking teenagers, game-playing teenagers, plots, lots of people dying before the mystery gets itself solved. The minute the heroine, Deaver, asks for the IP addresses I'm sure the thing is doomed, but the blogger refuses to give them up (at first). The plots thickens and twists and turns to an unexpected end.

It is very hard to address a technical topic such as social media without boring half the readers - either the ones who know about and use social media, or the ones who have no interest in them at all. They tried cross-media, putting up a "real" blog: The Chilton Report. Okay, it was built with NetObjects Fusion 11, but nothing is linked, you have to have the links in the book in order to see the pages. I did spend most of yesterday just sitting there, reading, however. A good vacation read, especially when it rains most every day...

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