New cyber-thriller: Storm by Dave Pearson

STORM is a brand new, quite terrifying and very suspenseful cyber-thriller by Dave Pearson. I got a copy for free to review it on this site, and as this is Pearson’s debut book, my expectations were relatively modest. This book, however, took me by Storm – I was sucked into the storyline after just some very few pages, and it kept me thrilled to the very end.

The tale in Storm really is a very modern – almost mind-blowing – intriguing, intelligent and compelling story, quite tech-savvy but with several interesting human touches as well. In the beginning we meet up with a young kid, Dutch, already a full-blown, highly skilled hacker, and his similarly talented cyber-friends. The friends are Spyder, Ray, Skye and Skreemer. They call themselves STORM, and only Dutch and Spyder of the five hackers in the group know one another the old-fashioned, physical way. The others have met over safe phone lines and in cyberspace, and they only know one another by their call names. While they are in the process of finally – after many futile attempts – hacking into a top secret site, one of the guys is arrested (while phreaking, i.e. manipulating telephone networks) and the group splits up.

After having stayed away from hacking for twenty years and been out of touch with the other members of the group, Dutch is suddenly, out of nowhere, contacted by one of the guys from STORM. He needs Dutch for a new hack the group has been planning for a long time. It is the final challenge, the ultimate hack – they want to break in to an ultra top secret military facility, heavily encrypted and protected by impenetrable firewalls.  Dutch can’t resist this intriguing challenge, and soon he is on his way to Compound Five, the most heavily protected facility of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to attack the Intelink. It turns out to be a hack different from anything Dutch anticipated, and so much more – it will take everything Dutch has to make it out alive.

Storm is hot! It’s a wonderful high-adrenaline action-packed roller-coaster of a thriller, as intense and engaging in some ways as the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson and my favorite Dan Brown novel, Digital Fortress. The plot really rocks, and I found the technology and hacking to be fascinating to the extreme. This really is a fabulous read, an excellent cyber-thriller, and I have to admit that I can’t wait for the next book in this series.

Tagged as: book review, cyber-thriller, Dave Pearson, Dutch, hackers, Storm