Review: Spy tale with tech twist
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 14, 2014
Peter Hammond is a British secret agent who returns to the UK from a life abroad after his accountant brother Chris, whom he hasn’t seen in 16 years, is murdered. Chris was the financial manager of a high tech firm developing an encryption algorithm that would shut out government attempts to access private sector data.  Chris found an accounting irregularity; his boss denied it, and after sending an email to an unknown recipient, Chris is shot in his own home.Peter starts searching for answers, using his agency’s resources to help. But he’s walking into a rat’s nest of complicated relationships; the centerpiece is the one between Chris’s widow, Jenny, and Chris’s boss, both of whom like a little S&M.; Peter used to be in love with Jenny and her marriage to the brother caused the 16-year break and he feels more than a little protective of her and her children. But Peter is past his prime as a secret agent, and he’ll make some rookie mistakes before he solves the crime.The tech details are well written and the plot devices are spun out at the right intervals. The connections between players are ingenious—be prepared not to see a number of them coming—although the pace is not swift or staccato but mellowed by quite a bit of description and backstory throughout. More of the tech angle would have been welcome, not because the book needed it, but because the author was able to provide better explanations of complicated concepts than most of today’s news shows.