Pointless piece of prose that classifies itself as a thriller. It is just a soporific piece of fiction that promises more than it delivers.
No thrilling aspect at all. Pieces of futuristic technology mix oddly with bits of retro, which doesn't help the credibility. The plot is infantile. The love story is so flimsy, it is laughable, and Anna is such a boring person. I think she is well-suited to her job as tax inspector.

The only saving grace of this book is its decent writing. Pity for failed storyline and weak plot. ( )

In the beginning I liked the style of this book and the fact that I was finding a story that revolves around an Inland Revenue tax inspector interesting amused me too. As the book went on though I didn't find the plot to be gripping enough and the elegance I found in the writing was really just because it's written in the present tense. Not a bad book but not enough to make me look the author out again. ( )

This novel was very entertaining, and often beautifully written. There was a particular poignancy in reading about an entirely new medium of currency and the sudden global loss of confidence in it while we are in the midst of the current economic downturn, especially as so much of the media clamours for revenge against a few individual scapegoats
As a former tax inspector myself I found the depictions of Inland Revenue investigations rather implausible (I certainly wish that we had had access to even a fraction of the information channels available to Anna Moore!) However, the awkward relations between the various Revenue colleagues did seem all too uncomfortably familiar.
The novel hovers effortlessly between genres - part science fiction, part thriller and part love story, and frequently reminded me of William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition": it has that same background of unfocused melancholy, partially evoked by the marvellous descriptions of London's skylines.
I just wish that there could have been a bit more about cryptography itself. ( )

I always doubted that poetry and crime fiction fit well together. Hill proves they don’t. I like mystery, but don’t like it if the plot remains a mystery to me. I admire myself for having reached the last page (when I immediately threw the book away lest my daughter finds it and commits suicide).

Anna, a neurotic tax-inspector staggering through an investigation, falling in love with her “client” and in the end eats breakfast with her ex-lover/ex-colleague. Meanwhile she admires an expensive building encounters some crazy children and has cryptic conversation with Anneli, a Finnish lunatic. Some lines from classic poems without connection to the story and at least 50 dialogues with erratic and elusive allusions, sounding like this: “I knew I wouldn’t know. Would I?” “I knew you would not, even…” “Just what I thought, though.” Or something like that (mostly worse). I would have liked to write a spoiler review but couldn’t since I still don’t know what it was all about. ( )

yawn, sci-fi? weird and unconvincing, I couldn't shake the image of the new potatoes being scrubbed and the whole book felt like that, scrubbed off of the nitty gritty that nourishes the stuff underneath.