teamfreak16's Full Review: John Sandford - The Hanged Man's Song
Bobby is dead.
Wheelchair-bound, and therefore unable to defend himself, his head bashed in with an oxygen cylinder and his laptop is missing. It would be just another routine burglary/murder except that Bobby was possibly the country’s most powerful hacker, and the information on his computer might incriminate people in his hacking ring, including Kidd (just “Kidd.”) Wanting to avenge his friend’s death and protect his own interests, Kidd sets out to learn the identity of Bobby’s killer and recover the stolen laptop. Such is the premise of author John Sandford’s 2003 novel The Hanged Man’s Song.
Bobby is a superhacker. He can get into any system, anywhere, and he pretty much “owns the phone company.” When Bobby suddenly goes offline, his trusted hacking ring gets nervous, and Kidd and his friend John journey to Bobby’s Mississippi home, where they find him dead on the floor, his head caved in by an oxygen tank.
To make matters worse, Bobby’s laptop is missing, and it’s full of codes, files, and possibly incriminating evidence that could be disastrous if it ends up in the wrong hands.
Kidd and John soon figure out that the main suspect is Jimmy James Carp, and the two enlist the help of Kidd’s part-time lover/partner LuEllen (just “LuEllen”) to find him.
It’s not easy. Carp knows they are on to him, and he is not above resorting to violence as a first option. After numerous narrow escapes, the trio learns that the outcome all hinges on an abandoned teenage girl named Rachel, and Carp is on to her too.
My previous experiences with the Kidd series have produced mixed results. They’re decent-enough (if average) reads, but not very thrilling. The Hanged Man’s Song, so far, is the best of the lot. For one thing, there is some actual tension. In previous Kidd novels, the protagonists never seemed in danger even when they were in danger. Here, Carp is out to kill them and seemingly knows their every move before they do.
Another difference is that this time, Kidd can’t use Bobby as his main source of information (what with Bobby being dead and all.) Before, he would just dial Bobby up and explain what info he needed, Bobby would spend some time in cyberspace, and deliver the information back to one of Kidd’s dump email addresses. Here, Kidd has to find everything himself, figuring it out on his own or through his hacking prowess.
LuEllen, the master burglar, has a diminished role—she only aids in one break-in and exists here mainly for sexual purposes. LuEllen remains as mysterious as ever—Kidd knows very little about her real life, and since Sandford wrote the book in Kidd's point of view, we only learn what Kidd knows. Finally, however, we do at least learn LuEllen’s real name.
In The Hanged Man’s Song, despite assistance from LuEllen and John, it’s all up to Kidd this time around. Without Bobby’s help, Kidd proves resourceful in his own right. He is an interesting enough character—an artist good enough that his work sells, but he makes the really big bucks via computers. He is also a tarot reader (the “Hanged Man” references that particular card”) and a karate expert, although that’s unmentioned here.
Neither Kidd nor LuEllen were the problem with the previous novels. The issue was that the books were such light reading that they were missing some of the bite of the better entries in Sandford’s Prey series (or even, his Virgil Flowers books.) The Kidd novels were merely average at best. The Hanged Man’s Song, however, delivers an entertaining, fun read. It’s too bad the rest of the series couldn’t live up to this one’s promise.
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