Offered for your consideration: Phate. Omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent -- having cast himself in his own personal world as a god; but not the god of love. Phate instead has come to represent all that is dark, all that is evil, all that scurries behind the baseboards and under the furniture when you turn on the lights. Phate is your destiny; your personal Thanatos. He is Death; his modus operandi is access.

Phate is the god of hacking -- no, make that cracking, the evil side of hacking. He can steal your identity, frame you with bogus court documents, divert your telephone calls, turn your home or your business or your hospital bed into a death trap; all he needs is access. And he's good at getting access; perhaps the best that ever lived. For Phate, the ultimate access is watching the life drain from your eyes. Phate is a man of infinite disguises: the meter reader; the police officer at your door, the damsel in distress who needs to use your phone; the good Samaritan on the highway. He is also a serial murderer addicted to the adrenaline rush. He's a murderer with a plan: ever more difficult kills on ever better-protected victims -- and a tool: the most insidious packet-sniffing SPY software ever created.


Fighting Fire with Fire

Arrayed against the godlike Phate are mere mortals -- the San Francisco Police Department's Computer Crime Unit -- career cops to whom computers and the internet are but passing curiosity. They are aging dinosaurs in a world that evolves in the blink of an eye; massive, slow-moving beasts floundering in an environment where only the fleet of foot and sharp of eye will live; and dinosaurs will die. Phate will be only to happy to help them toward their eventual end.

It has been said that "to catch a thief, you must set a thief"; so the CCU springs Wyatt Gillette from where he languishes in Federal Prison. Wyatt is America's most famous hacker; convicted of invading the Department of Defense mainframe and defeating its vaunted encryption software. Possessed of a hacker's tan (even more pallid than a prison tan), massively developed wrists and forearms on an otherwise puny frame, and an addiction to pop-tarts and Jolt cola; Wyatt is a hacker's hacker. The CCU sets him on the trail of Phate, for Wyatt may be the last line of defense against a madman who traps his victims with a computer and kills them with a knife through the heart.


Phinding Phate

How do you track down someone who can disguise his every move? someone who can reach into your files and twist the information you already have? someone who knows every move you make almost as soon as you plan the move? Wyatt's search for Phate moves at breakneck speed down the electronic avenues through twists and turns in the routers and cables and switches and relays of the internet. Phate's flight; his red herrings and twisted dodges flash across the same electronic avenues at near lightspeed as well in a duel dancing about the surface of the information highway. Not the trashy, flashy world of the world-wide web, but down at the levels of file-transfer protocol, finger, telnet -- tracking minuscule electronic footprints in the packets of information transmitted and received by email and browser programs; user-transparent functions that make the internet work. Wyatt is good. Phate is better, especially since he's getting help from his mysterious partner Shawn.


Devious Deaver

As does every Jeffery Deaver novel, The Blue Nowhere features blind alleys and plot twists and turns galore. No character is a super-human detective in the Spenser mold; all are flawed human beings with regular lives -- lives that Phate and Shawn can (and do) invade to lay false trails. Tidbits of information -- a sideways glance, a furtive phone call, an errant email -- at one time cast each and every character as Phate's mole in the CCU, as the unknown Shawn, as Phate himself. Deaver builds his plot brick upon brick, layer upon layer, until at last the workings of Phate's mind are laid bare, and the mysterious Shawn is revealed. Death and betrayal combine to chart a tortuous course to the final denouement, and love and lust peek in on the plot from time to time as well.


Better Writing Through Research

Perhaps no other popular author researches his work so thoroughly as Jeffery Deaver -- and his novels cover a wide range of subject matter. In A Maiden's Grave Deaver delved into the world of the hearing-impaired so well and deeply that he could form puns in sign language. His Lincoln Rhyme series (The Bone Collector, The Empty Chair, and others) features research into not only the underpinnings of crime scene investigation, but also into the life of a quadriplegic. For Manhattan is My Beat, Deaver learned to think like a twenty-something woman who lives a hand-to-mouth existence as a squatter in a New York City warehouse.

In The Blue Nowhere Deaver treads on ground with which I am personally more familiar. I looked at the glossary of hacking terms that accompanies the novel, and found only one or two that were not familiar (if you live in a UNIX world like I do, most will be familiar to you as well). And still his research proved to be darned good -- a bit out of date, but good. Some quibbles:

* At one point, Deaver cites a frequency of 2600 megahertz for telephone communications switching signals (the beeps that used to allow Phreakers to use their blue boxes). Excuse me Jeff, that's 2600 Hertz -- 2600 megahertz is 'way too high for even dogs to hear.

* Deaver talks a great deal about the UNIX underpinnings of the internet, but his characters also frequently hack into DEC supercomputers running VMS. Sad to say, I thought VMS -- one of the most user-friendly operating systems ever -- was basically dead. I hope not, but I fear so...


The Overall Take

Deaver's villain is a berserker living within his version of a violent MUD (Multi-User Dungeon; online computer game) named "Access." In this plot, Deaver is capitalizing on the public perception that violent computer games yield violent children -- sort of a post-Columbine mantra. Whether there is in fact a causative link is as yet unknown; any arguments appear to still be of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc genre. Deaver makes no argument as to the veracity of the game-violence linkage, but one can be sure that his readers will make up their own minds.

All and all, The Blue Nowhere presents a truly disturbing picture of the underside of the internet in all its many faces: the very terrifying possibility that right now some unknown person somewhere in the world is watching your every keystroke; plotting your demise. One certainly hopes that such people only exist in the pages of books and in Deaver's fertile imagination; one fears that such people live just down the street.

Recommended: Yes