Had this on some sort of book recommendation list ever since reading Ready Player One. Someone recommended it as a similar book, but with better character development. I'm not sure I agree on the similarities (it DOES have a virtual world in it... but that's about where the similarities end), but it was DEFINITELY a page-turner. Computer viruses, kidnappings, Russian mobsters, international espionage, Muslim terrorists... but what really sold me was the first location in the book: Forthrast Farm - Northwest Iowa.
Whaaa??! As wild as the content of this book is, to imagine that it starts and ends in Iowa was a huge surprise. And it didn't just randomly have Iowa content... it kept referencing back to thinks I recognize wholeheartedly as a midwesterner.
I finally figured out my Calibre highlighting extraction, so here are some of the numerous passages I highlighted as either highly relatable or otherwise just plain great writing:
He was neither dead nor here, but in Idaho, a state often confused, by bicoastal folks, with Iowa, but that in fact was the anti-Iowa in many respects, a place that Iowans would only go to in order to make some kind of statement.
My new word-of-the-day: obstreperous
The GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over Richard’s unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getting to their destination, and it changed its fickle little mind and began calmly telling him which way to proceed as if this had been its idea all along.
Something happened very fast, making no sense at all to Csongor, whose ideas as to what video-game combat should look like were, he guessed, hopelessly old-fashioned. The few times he had tried to play popular video games in Internet cafés in Budapest he had been vanquished in microseconds by opponents who, to judge from the nature of their taunting, were very young, possibly still in the single digits.
This sort of thing had never used to happen, because the road didn’t really lead anywhere; beyond the Schloss, it reverted to gravel and struggled around a few more bends to an abandoned mining camp a couple of miles beyond, where the only thing motorists could do was turn around in a wide spot and come back out again. But geocachers had been at work planting Tupperware containers and ammo boxes of random knickknacks in tree forks and under rocks in the vicinity of that turnaround, and people kept visiting those sites and leaving their droppings on the Internet, making cheerful remarks about the nice view, the lack of crowds, and the availability of huckleberries.
(Later - speaking of the terrorists who had scoped out the spot)
Um.... I'm a bit more nervous about geocaching now...
This one sort of sums up the insanity of the plot:
Seamus had no idea what level of precautions was appropriate here. Apparently these three had left half of the surviving population of China seriously pissed off at them, as well as making mortal enemies with a rogue, defrocked Russian organized crime figure. In their spare time they had stolen money from millions of T’Rain players, created huge problems for a large multinational corporation that owned the game, and, finally—warming to the task—mounted a frontal assault on al-Qaeda. Had their coordinates been generally known, no amount of security would have been adequate. Seamus’s sidearm was a nice gun and everything, but it would not be much use should China invade the Philippines, or should one of Abdallah Jones’s minions decide to Stuka a fuel-laden 767 into the roof of the Best Western.
Another new term learned: glissade:
he leaned forward carefully and allowed himself to skid down the slope on the soles of his boots, a procedure known as a standing glissade. Essentially he was skiing without skis. It was a common enough practice, when slope and conditions allowed it, and his involvement in the cat skiing industry had given him many opportunities to practice. He covered the distance to the tree line in a small fraction of the time it would have taken him to pick his way down from rock to rock. En route he fell three times. The last fall was a deliberate plunge into a snowbank to kill his velocity before he slammed into the trees. The snowbank was soft, and now sported a Richard-shaped depression that cradled his tired and battered body in a way that was extremely comfortable.
01/19/2025 // F // Kindle