I was not a huge fan of the narration, buy the story line itself kept me intrigued. This was my 1st book by this author and I will definitely be picking up another.

Fast-paced book about Silicon Valley (1414 degrees being the melting point of silicon) and the ruthlessness of the tech founders. Journalist Lou McCarthy is desperate to expose Alex Wu's sexual abuse life and submits an article with details from her anonymous source only to find out that she has been set up. This leads to her being pursued by trolls determined to harm her and her mother. Rescued just in time by Helen Tyler, the two women try to find out who has been messing with the big tech firms in Silicon Valley. Really enjoyed listening to this book.

The cover is a bit confusing, but I guess there's a reason for the saying "don't judge a book by its cover." I really enjoyed this tech thriller, especially given the stories one hears in the news. What I liked about this book is that Carr told the story differently from a lot of his contemporaries, and I enjoyed his unique perspective. The plot had be engaged until the very end, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

This is the first tech-thriller I've read, and one of the first audiobooks I've listened to. And boy am I glad I did. Carr's novel is an exciting ride through the shady side of Silicon Valley, told from the point of view of a headstrong journalist. Lou is a strong woman in the face of misogyny, classism, and pure danger. She refuses to let any threat keep her back, which makes her a hell of a character to follow.

The narration was done very well. Emily Lawrence did a great job making sure the listener/reader could keep up with the story. One of my concerns with audiobooks has always been being able to keep characters straight, and Lawrence did wonderfully in making sure each character had their own space on the stage.

1414 is a great read for anyone who wants a gritty thriller in their personal library.

Thank you NetGalley for the advanced audiobook! I had a hard time with this one…the narration made it hard for me to tell which character was which, and this story had so many details. I think possibly reading the text would be better, but I tried the audiobook from NetGalley and didn’t love it. 1414 is a story that you have to pay full attention to and really get sucked into the story. Definitely a slow burn, and my first tech-type thriller book.

This was a decent story! I had a bit of a hard time keeping up with all the details and the pacing was a little rapid, leaving out details. There is a chance I was simply reading too fast, however. :)

I appreciated the eventual connection to the title, but it was really unclear until we got nearly finished with the book. I kept wondering what would mean something. I liked the characters, and for the most part, this felt like an interesting story. It wasn't something that blew me away - the twists of the story were fairly predictable, but it was a good enough story to stay with it through the end.

Thanks to NetGalley and Snafublishing for granting me access to this book in exchange for an honest review.

I gave this book 3.5 stars.

A gripping technological adult thriller that discusses sensitive but important issues for the current society.

Lou McCarthy is a journalist and has spent her life exposing powerful men from Silicon Valley whose position has allowed them to abuse women. After she publishes an article agains Alex Lou, one of the biggest fish, she’s mysteriously invited to a party hosted by his company and, when asked to apologise, he seems to have committed suicide. Another powerful man commits suicide the same week and Lou is accused of murdering both men, so she starts an investigation to clean her name and find the killer. However, she ends up kind of wanting to help them once she learns their reasons.

This book is definitely plot driven. Characters are relatable, nobody’s perfect and mistakes have consequences that are sometimes deadly or irreversible. I would have loved side characters’ backgrounds to be explained more, though.

There are certain topics that I found essential to make readers think about, such as the discussion of who owns the world (a.k.a. white males, mainly), the fact that those who are powerful confuse equality with oppression and that no matter how far we’ve come along the journey, there’s still a long way to go and one of the best ways to become allies is to publicly put cases in the spotlight.

Although the topics were interesting, there were sections of the book, especially around two thirds of the way through, in which I was not interested.

I’d recommend this book to you unless the abovementioned topics or physical, verbal and psychological abuse are a trigger to you.

1414°
by Paul Bradley Carr
Narrated by Emily Lawrence
This is an audio book I requested from NetGalley and the publisher and I want to thank them for letting me listen to the book. Having said that, I found this book a bad fit for me. I loved the premise and plot on paper. But I just could not get into to this book from the beginning. The narration, the dialogue....nothing sounded plausible or interesting.
The narration was poor. It was difficult to distinguish one person from another. Ugh.
I wanted to give up so many times but I won't do that to a book I promised to read. This one came close.
I gave it 2 stars for the plot and the premise.

The concept of the book is both timely and topical. I didn't LOVE the narration, but it wasn't terrible. Each chapter kept me interested and I didn't feel like the book ran too long or too short. If you're looking for a thriller taking place in the silicon valley with a bit of futuristic technology, then this one is for you.

I went into this one completely blind as to what it was about and I think that contributed to the fantastic roller coaster ride that followed. So forgive me for not really talking about the phenomenally paced plot in detail, but I'd like new listeners/readers to get the same explosive experience. Just a trigger warning that sexual abuse plays a significant role.
The plot seems huge and touches on some major themes, but focusing on down-on-her-luck journalist Lou grounds the story and helps add to the impact of its events. It's honestly a bit terrifying to think that there are a lot of real-world parallels that inspired the story and that it could conceivably be a thing that is happening right now.

I have to give props to the excellent narration by Emily Lawrence as she excels at filling the scenes with just the right tone and emotion for them to hit even harder.

Very happy thanks to NetGalley and Snafublishing for the incredibly engaging read.

1414 degrees (the melting point of silicon) - Women whose bodies, ideas, and careers are raped by very badly behaved Silicon Valley billionaire bros attempt to get their revenge. Instead, the bros are given the opportunity to right their wrongs after the women relent and give them the benefit of the doubt, largely because the biggest billionaire of them all is planning to use his money to create a foundation in memory of his dead brother. The reader is basically forced to sympathize with the bros, who are in debt to the son of a murderous Saudi king, and see the women as vindictive, murderous sociopaths instead of women who were justifiably trying to make their voices heard despite the very real obstacles faced by women. Anyone looking to read about women taking down the patriarchy should skip this book and read one which is, at the very least, written by a woman.

Ok so this was a different one for me but I thought it sounded so interesting. It was my first an audiobook so that was interesting too. It took me a second to get used to it but as soon as I got in to it I was sucked in! It was a really good read and very different from what I usually go for. It's a suspense kinda read based in Silicon Valley. It was about the underbelly of the tech industry and the corruption and male dominating field that it is. The suspense of what would happen next and rooting for the underdogs of the story which end up being females. Thats what I liked about it, it was good read but had a good point about the importance of diversity in the tech industry. Very good book!

The narrator is compelling and keeps you listening to Silicon Valley thriller. Free press verse corporate greed. The title and cover do not do justice to this audiobook.

I love a good thriller and this book kept me on my toes! Paul Bradley Carr wrote a fast paced thriller about a silicone valley VIP suicide and a reporter who is ruthless. If you love a good whodunnit mystery this is for you! Thank you Snafublishing and NetGalley for the ARC!

Well that was an interesting and entertaining read/listen. This book is a hard look at the ins and outs of the tech world - where it's notoriously difficult for women to get a good foothold, especially when it comes to being up front on the programming side. It starts as a murder mystery, then morphs into a revenge story. The protagonist, Lou, is a reporter for an online news site whose determined to publish what she "knows" to be true (even if she doesn't have as much corroboration as her editor would like), and that determination has already cost her a lot, including putting her career in jeopardy. It's also made her a prime target for someone who wants to use her as part of a murder/revenge plan, and leads her to investigate just who has used her. This book is fast-paced and while I don't have a lot of real-world experience with most of the subject matter here, the author does, and it shows. Well-written and well-narrated.
Thanks to Netgalley and Snafublishing for providing a copy for an unbiased review.

A journalist goes about exposing two high profile people from Silicon Valley who do not want their secrets exposed people try to warn her to stop but she doesn’t . And it cost her everything.
I wasn’t sure what to expect at first from the cover but I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a murder mystery about the Tech world which Does interest me. And you will find out the meaning of the title in the story At first I thought the story was going to be a little slow but by chapter two Lou was in the middle of everything murder, mystery and high tech money. This was a fascinating story about the tech world and I liked that the journalist was a strong female character thank you NetGalley for letting me listen to the audio version of this book.

Firsts Impressions

This one was so intriguing, I mean Lou was awesome and reporting the truth no matter the cost was a very good starting point in this one.

The plot was very compelling and it did enveloped me very quickly, the conspiracy and the half truths that were coming every page were so grand that I was like omg then what's next. Total page turner this one.

You have a ghost killer that doesn't seem is wanting to be found or maybe it is? but then how and why are the killing connected really, it will hook you since page one.

Characters

The characters were so fascinating, their motivations not always clear since they deal in a lot of gray areas of life and such but you could feel they were trying hard really hard to be there for others or maybe only to gain something.

Helen was so relatable in a way, she was trying her best to help people in her own way, at times she did seemed maybe deranged in her ways but her heart was in the correct place.

Lou was so complex, she wanted to do the right thing who doesn't and then it got so twisted in the road and she was still trying to just be true to herself.

Lou mom and her friend Carol were so badass, I was just expecting to hear what else were they doing and who they were educating next, so cool really.

Themes

This one did dwell in very hard themes, like rape and predators in big companies and how our culture is so male that nothing seems to go fine for the victims only for the perpetrators, but they did have a very good antagonistic force on this one, very powerful women that are best at what they do and try to stop all this cycle of violence in their own terms and with any available weapon.

Final Thoughts

By the end even the title take on a new whole level, it was so awesome for me to learn what it was and how did it related to the whole story, it was genius really.

I was enthralled by this plot, it had a lot of twists and turns and unexpected revelations that I couldn't be bored even for a second, it was a superb thriller.

1414 a thriller. Competition between women vs. the male in Silicon Valley. Tree main characters, a consultant, a journalist and a technical genius. They are all motivated to expose the mystery of suicides by upcoming men in the tech world. It keeps one guessing. The book is well written but I had a hard time getting into the story line.

This book was so difficult to get into. I didn’t really want to finish it, but wanted to give it a chance. The narrator and story were not great for me, but I am super picky about who I can listen to.

5 stars

Add this awesome, suspenseful thriller to the top of your hot new books to listen to this summer!

Imagine a San Franciso-based British investigative journalist covering the bro-tech culture of Silicon billionaire hotshots and stumbling across untold instances of covered up sexual abuse by these new captains of industry. Over his 20-year career working for traditional established press (The Guardian, TechCrunch, Wall St. Journal, The Sunday Times) he’s unable to publish all this bad behavior, either from lack of definitive evidence, threats of retaliation, or the cowering of publishers avoiding lawsuits. Well, there we have Paul Bradly Carr, who turns around and writes a debut novel featuring a woman investigative journalist just like him who gets caught in a treacherous web of bad-boy cover-ups due to her expose writing on their acts of misogyny.

Lou McCarthy has wrapped her professional life as a reporter for the Bay Area Herald around covering Silicon Valley’s tech industry and writing brazen exposes calling out the white-men-ego-tripping sexual abuse. She’s also fought off a hot tech corporation’s takeover and destruction of her rent-controlled building in order to clear the view around their new skyscraper, which ultimately renders her homeless, sleeping in her office. Her latest expose targets that same tech company heading to IPO, Raum, who’s CTO has a long-standing pattern of self-abuse based on all of Lou’s first-person interviews of his victims. But before she can write about any of these past instances, each victim gets bought off with vast sums and goes radio silent on her.

When an anonymous source sends Lou a copy of a sexual assault suit about to be filed, she publishes a piece. But the copy of the suit turns out to be a mysterious hoax: Lou’s called out for it, her editor is beside himself, the Herald’s legal counsel up in arms about a potential defamation suit. From her the plot rockets into action, with the CTO Lou covered killing himself in spectacular fashion at a private party hosted by Ruam, flinging himself from an upper floor and impaling himself on a ice culture in the inner atrium. Mayhem ensures, a death call from a fringe men’s rights internet group gets put out on Lou, and she’s rescued by a bad-ass corporate-fixer, Helen, a hired-gun who is quietly retained by boards of tech companies about to go public with the task of outing the bad boys. Add on top of this a murderer, who may be systematically and stealthily taking out these bad boys of tech as retaliation for their heinous, unpunished acts.

As Lou and Helen kick into gear, and kick ass in the process, this feminist thriller enthralls while condemning the start-up tech culture in Silicon Valley that turns a blind eye to abusive behavior in the constant quest for the next IPO unicorn that will make all of the investors rich beyond imagining.

Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced audio version of this book.