Murder

A clever, economical and fast-paced thriller. I wonder why John Sandford gave up on this series.

The ring had been set up by Bobby. A group of people that he more or less trusted were each given one segment of his address. If anything should happen to him-if his system went unresponsive-we'd each dump our "word" at a blind e-mail address. Whoever checked the email would assemble the word, derive a street address, and go to Bobby's house to see what had happened. I didn't know who'd been designated to go. Somebody closer to Bobby than I was. To keep the cops from breaking the ring, if one of us should be caught, we knew only the online names of two members of the ring.

Kidd investigates high level computer/database hacking, political surveillance, murder, blackmail and abduction. ( )

This novel is part of a series by John Sanford featuring Kidd, a legitimate painter and not so legitimate computer hacker. This is the fourth in the series, but the first I have read. It stand alone quite well although it contains an occasional reference to events that probably took place in earlier books in the series.

In this book, an extremely competent hacker with the avatar Bobby is murdered in the first chapter. Although Kidd has never met Bobby, they are allies of a sort among hackers. Bobby’s murder spells trouble for Kidd because Bobby has a great deal of dangerous information about a lot of people, which may include Kidd himself. Kidd and his sometime lover LuEllen go searching for Bobby’s incriminatory laptop with a secondary motive of bringing retribution to Bobby’s killer. Sanford shares some interesting techniques of computer hackers, but the search for the laptop and the killer is somewhat humdrum as thrillers go.

(JAB) ( )