Rating: 
Summary: Fun and Intriguing
Review: This is terrific reading. Yes, there are a lot of technological terms, but I learned a lot about hackers and the internet this way. To quote a reviewer "One cannot have "muscular fingers", may I say that Mr. Deaver perhaps should have said instead "muscular-looking fingers". Such nit-picking!
Rating: 
Summary: A Mishmash of styles
Review: It is hard to figure who Deaver is pitching this book out to.Savvy Computer users or his usual audience of airport stand readers. If it's the latter they'll be put off with the technical terminology - it's hard to make computer's [desirable](probably why there are so few movies with nerds as heroes). For computer literate people (such as myself I hope)explaining every computer term used at length makes the pacing slow. It just seems the book is so much padding and should have done with some editorial pruning. Unlike an earlier reviewer I'm a third of the way through the book and I feel I have some inkling as to who this mysterious Shawn is. This person's so incompetent that either he's crooked or going to be killed off in a later chapter. Maybe I'm wrong. Deaver should stick to his Lincoln Rhyme novels.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Read and a Wild Ride!!!!!
Review: Phate! The name alone makes you squirm in discomfort. When you couple that with the ingenious way that the person who takes that name as his cyberspace "handle" has developed a program that enables him to kill perfect strangers in order to win a "game" played among hackers, your discomfort rachets itself up to a sense of forboding. "Could someone really do this?" Jeffery Deaver, in what may be his best work to date, invites the reader into what would be any computer crime investigator's worst nightmare and he does it with such alacrity and believeablity that you may never look at your computer the same way again. As usual, Deaver has come up with a wealth of characters. Some of them you fear for. Others you hate. Some you pity. As the CCU, (Computer Crimes Unit) tries to stop Phate from killing again, they learn that he has an accomplice that remains a mystery until the very end of the story. I defy anyone to figure it out until it is revealed. Phate's nemesis and alter-ego is recruited from prison by the police to assist them in their hunt, which sets off various entertaining sub-plots concerning the life and future of Wyatt Gillette. If you like to be pulled through a story by its very momentum and realistic telling, this book is for you. Mr. Deaver has written nothing but compelling thrillers and he shows no evidence of losing his touch.
Rating:
Summary: Don't click on this one
Review: Books set in the worlds of forensic science, pathology or criminal psychology generally aim to inform as well as entertain, and since so few readers are crime professionals in real life, any inaccuracies go unnoticed in the quest for a good read. A book based on computer hackers, however, is a much riskier proposition with an increasingly computer-literate population. In The Blue Nowhere, full of constant efforts to show off his computer knowledge, Mr Deaver, usually an enthralling crime author, falls flat on his face. People no longer fear computers as some kind of voodoo box. Even to the most virus-plagued home users the notion of a hacker being able to tap in anywhere anytime at will to cut power, intercept specific phone calls, order injections and open electronic gates - often all at once - is bordering on fanciful or at least unlikely. Even sillier is the depiction of hackers and their personal habits. Hackers reportedly type so much they get tell-tale calluses on their fingertips (as opposed to law-abiding professional programmers) and do fingertip pushups to strengthen them - the harder the fingers, the better the code! Hackers are so powerful that keys fly off and keyboards disintegrate under their touch. Hackers can 'feel' the machine and it's power- is this the digital age, or the middle ages? Even if you're willing to accept all this for the sake of the story, the book is annoying. The chapters are gratuitously numbered in binary (which the author himself admits he can't read). The text includes full email headers everywhere - gee, we're impressed. Every few pages someone has to stop and explain a new buzzword, acronym, or UNIX command to the dummies in the book, and presumably the dummies reading the book. The plot starts off interestingly but degenerates into an dreary and endless battle of who can seize control of whose root directory. The hacker hero, Wyatt Gillette, is an unappealing character - like the hacker stereotype he's a pimply boy who eats only Pop-Tarts, drinks Jolt Cola, doesn't wash and is pale and stooped from sitting over a screen. Unlike the typical hacker he's longng to have babies with his ex-wife, and muses on the metaphors between real and cyber existence - all in all, I found him a real pain, and the other characters boring. The one realy computer-literate female even gasps at the cleverness of his code. The whole book is simply pretentious and tedious. If you're into machines killing people, go and watch Japanese sci-fi. If you're into crime books, give this one a miss and read the Devil's Teardrop.
Rating: 
Summary: The Blue Nowhere
Review: I got hooked on Deaver's books by the reading "The Bone Collector". Once I find an author I like, I'll order most of their previous works and then anxiously await their new publication. This one I could have passed on. If you're a computer geek, it may be for you, though you'll probably get just as confused as I did because I think Deaver got confused with the terminology. Not a well thought out novel as far as his characters go. Confusing, not well thought out characters - confused and disappointed reader.
Rating:
Summary: Leave your brain at the door for this one, tech geeks
Review: As a tecno geek myself, I can't help but say that this book is totally unrealistic and it's obvious that Deaver did only a minimal amount of research for this book. The main premise of the book, that there can be a super-virus that can allow a hacker to "seize root" of anyone's computer as soon as they connect to the internet, is totally ridiculous. Deaver shows an appalling lack of computer knowledge. The portrayal of the hackers in this book is completely stereotypical, there are no hackers in the world like the characters in this book. And I've been using computers for 20 years pretty much 10-12 hours a day at work and home, and I still haven't gotten calluses on my fingers from using the keyboard. Nor have my fingers gotten any more "muscular". Suspension of disbelief is not enough, the whole premise of the book is built on a foundation of computer-illiteracy.
Rating:
Summary: "surprise! fooled ya! ha ha!"
Review: There were too many "surprise twists" in this book for me. So many, in fact, that after awhile I stopped being surprised by the surprises. About two-thirds of the way through, I stopped believing anything that was happening because I knew that as soon as I turned the page, "surprise! fooled ya! ha ha!" would happen. It just became too gimmicky.
Rating:
Summary: What a ride!!
Review: If you are looking for nonstop action with twists, turns, & red herrings, as well as characters that come to life, this book is for you. Without a doubt, one of the most suspense filled, wild rides I have ever had the pleasure of reading. Plausible, believable, exceptionally well researched and written, this book should get 6 stars if it was possible!!
Rating:
Summary: A great disappointment
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Blue Nowhere Goes Nowhere
Review: 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.
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