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A review by april_does_feral_sometimes
Zero Day by Mark Russinovich
2.0
I picked this one up because I listen to a podcast by Steve Gibson called 'Security Now'. He has recommended other books which have been excellent. However, this was a big disappointment. It sucked. The sad thing is it really shouldn't have. The plot was terrific. Terrorists decide to take down the Western World via the computers which now control every aspect of business from customer records to payroll to billing to factory machine control. Airplanes are flown by computers, and nuclear reactors are monitored and controlled by computers, as is the electrical grid and as are big ships. Everything! And all of it is vulnerable to viruses in real life, as it is in the book. I suspect it is only the threat of mutual destruction which currently saves us from our lax and lazy anti-virus efforts, with the exceptions we hear about every day.
The writing is the main reason it was bad. It's very stiff and awkward. As a result, most of the characters were wooden. The author paid more attention to his hero, so Jeff Aiken comes off as wooden for the first half of the story, but he's supposedly in mourning, and in the second half, he's emotional and excited because he becomes involved in tracking down hackers. Unfortunately, his character feels as clumsily put together as the sentences he lives in. There's a heroine, Daryl Haugen, naturally, who is a stunning goddess of a looker, and she is almost genius smart. The problem is she seemed more like an office assistant with not a lot of savvy. Only two characters appeared as smart as they were supposed to be and that was Jeff and his dark counterpoint, Vladimir Koskov -the two programmers. It's all very cinematic in the bad way of cookie cutter movie action.
The author works at Microsoft in a senior technical position and I think he should keep his day job, for now.
The writing is the main reason it was bad. It's very stiff and awkward. As a result, most of the characters were wooden. The author paid more attention to his hero, so Jeff Aiken comes off as wooden for the first half of the story, but he's supposedly in mourning, and in the second half, he's emotional and excited because he becomes involved in tracking down hackers. Unfortunately, his character feels as clumsily put together as the sentences he lives in. There's a heroine, Daryl Haugen, naturally, who is a stunning goddess of a looker, and she is almost genius smart. The problem is she seemed more like an office assistant with not a lot of savvy. Only two characters appeared as smart as they were supposed to be and that was Jeff and his dark counterpoint, Vladimir Koskov -the two programmers. It's all very cinematic in the bad way of cookie cutter movie action.
The author works at Microsoft in a senior technical position and I think he should keep his day job, for now.