Review: Too Much Information
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 3, 2014
The concept of this near future technothriller is a good one. With recent revelations about the actions of the NSA, if you can picture the technology depicted as being on the near horizon (not that big a stretch), it is both timely and credible. The potential for a good story is here.However, the story as delivered fell short of that potential. The reasons are three-fold. First, is the technical, with more polish needed to shake out the numerous typos and grammar errors.The second area are issues of writing craft, with multiple instances of head hopping, a tendency to tell something that should have been shown, and a character or the narrator magically knowing something that they couldn’t.The final area of concern were things happening that made no sense. Some were minor. For example when the protagonist saw a squirrel hop from a tree branch as his car was crashing into the tree. Another was a sequence where a couple of the characters had to attend a meeting, sneak into another part of a building (which involves bypassing a security measure to get there), break into a computer, locate and download some files from that computer, and get out of the building, all in thirty minutes.  I’m not sure which was less believable, that the characters thought they could do this or that they managed to do it without getting caught.Others were major, at least to me. For example during a court case a judge allowed the protagonist, Rob, to call a “rebuttal witness” in the middle of the other side putting on their case. Anyone who has watched more than one or two fictional court cases in a movie or on a TV show would be left scratching their head, wondering when the rules changed.**Originally written for "Books and Pals" book blog. May have received a free review copy. **