This is my first time reading a book like this and I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily for me but I didn’t hate it either. To me, it felt like I was immersed in a movie vs reading which I always like while I am reading. While I have ZERO hacking/coding experience or knowledge I did appreciate the on page usage of it. Did it make sense to me, nope but it was still pretty cool to see it. The first few pages made me feel like I was watching my husband play Cyberpunk and recommend he’d read it because it would be something he might find interesting. This is one of those books I keep in my back pocket to recommend to someone.

IDENTIFIED: A hacker thriller ripped from the headlines of today's newspapers
IDENTIFIED: A hacker thriller ripped from the headlines of today's newspapers by John Wilander
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Premise: hacker-focused heist in an uber-surveillance world.

Honestly, this book should 100% appeal to me. I love a great rag-tag rebellious skills-based comeuppance against corporate and nationalist Big Brother.

What is really surprising, and at least initially wonderful, was the sheer page-count of actual hacking, with actual hacking problems/knowledge. I can APPRECIATE the neat woo-woo of so many technical challenges and visualizations of the problems while also thinking, quite often, that it DESTROYS the natural flow of the novel.

So, it's a caveat. This is a fun techno-thriller that forces you to study and follow complicated grids of numbers with no easy way to just hand-wave the challenges away--unless you just skip them.

For those who do want a challenging book, by all means, pick this up and challenge yourselves. The story, characters, plot, are just fine. I'm not saying the whole book is impenetrable. It's also not a Greg Egan.

Brass tacks: is it fun? Yep. Does it challenge your T in your MBTI? Yep.

If I were to synesthesia this review, I'd say I'd be smelling ozone the entire time I read it. Specifically, dust getting burnt in ozone, the smell of a case getting cracked while the fan is still running, the heat of a machine in a cold room. My nose still feels cold in memory.

West Wilder is released on parole with a promise to never hack computers again. The world he knew has changed and the days of the NSA as a privacy-invading boogeyman seem almost quaint. Now a global security agency called G20S has its digital tentacles everywhere. Ordinary people are treated as threats just because they use the internet. Someone within G20S is not happy with West’s regained freedom, and puts their thumb on him and his family. "They always get you in the end." Unless West’s old hacker accomplice Melissa can help.

Fantastic read! While this is rather technical in some places, it is realistic in a really frightening way. This is the kind of realistic thriller that keeps me up at night, even after I've finished it. Definitely recommend this if you understand technology. If you don't, you might be a little bored. For me, 4.5⭐

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advanced copy. This is my honest opinion of the book.

I am a man of two minds about this book. On one side I found myself struggling a bit to work through it. It just wasn't hooking me. That doesn't mean it wasn't well written, or that others won't enjoy it. Despite not devouring it, I did respect the accuracy of the story. A lot of authors write about hacking and technology, and absolutely fumble it. That's not the case here. As a professional with over a decade in cybersecurity, I was impressed by the accuracy of the technical components. That's rare in fiction today.

I am clearly in the minority here. I did not like this book. It took me like 10-12 business days to read. It was dry and complicated and boring. Usually something as interesting as hacking would totally pique my interest. I found myself crawling thru these chapters and I didn’t connect to a single character.

Thanks for the eARC NetGalley, just a miss for me.

2 ⭐️

While I'm not a huge fan of hacker thrillers, this one was a bit scary to me because I could see a lot of these things actually happening in real life. It really makes you think about how any move you make digitally can be used for the wrong purpose.