As a technical manual excellent (this is my professional area). As a work of fiction, well... No believable characters whatsoever. The plot does get more and more ludicrous as the story lurches from one manufactured crisis to the other.

I don't really care how close it follows the Stuxnet worm Modus Operandi. A fiction book has got to follow up the rules of good fiction.

A really good non-fiction book on this: "Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power" by David Sanger. ( )

Mark Russinovich's 'Trojan Horse' is a solid novel of tech conflict that seems to be as plausible as his first 'Zero Day' effort. The lead characters bring their same combination of techie prowess and physicality to the story, and the adversaries are just as nefarious as ever. It's the 2nd book in what I hope is a long series by a guy who clearly knows the terrain, but there's work to do.

From a story standpoint, Trojan Horse has a great high level plot but there are issues underneath. China's nasty programming team creates an anti-malware program they're trying to send to Iran to help them combat further iterations of Stuxnet, while at the same time Iran is racing to test their a-bomb before the West can prevent it. Unfortunately for them, events intervene and the race is on to kill their program before our program can infect Iran's systems.

So, the plot's OK. A lot of the action seems to be a bit incredible, but not too far out. The writing is competent at best, and if there's an area for improvement for the author it'd be here. The technique of breaking up chapters with text from memos, letters, and news articles is effective in sort of slowing down the narrative, but the rest of the prose is very basic. Some of the content is obviously technical in nature and it's obvious the author respected the wide range of reader familiarity with the subject matter, so that may account for the relative unsophisticated writing style.

If you're not put off by technically-oriented thrillers, this is a good one. Recommended.... ( )

Started today, March 5th, 2013, just after finishing Zero Day by the same author.
Story goes the same way as Zero Day, and thus is not so surprising, or good.
Also I think the team should stick to working with computers and leave the rest of the investigation to the police or 3-letter agencies.
Without even a weapon going after criminals, terrorists, spies who have guns and more training in using it, is mad and in the end not very realistic.
Once I can accept, be it luck or turn of events, but this time 1 star less.
People and places are very detailed, sometimes too much so, could have been shorter and not every third-rate shortly mentioned person needs a background story or explanation.
It may not feel the same had I not read it back2back with Zero Day, I should have waited half a year or more.
Maybe the next one if and when it is published will read better, even when it may be written the same way (and then may be it really is better,
wait and see).
I will probably still buy and read it. ( )

Was ok, but not as much fun as the first one, the main character trying to hero it out is not really something that feels fits for the idea i had of him.

Would probaly buy the next book of the author, but i hope thats more techincally oriented again. ( )

Interesting plot, authentic technical background (and I deal with security issues myself). But the writing is just not up to the task. It makes for quite boring reading, despite plot attractiveness. I enjoyed technical references the most, rather than narrative. ( )