Darknet

I wanted to try some techno/cyber thrillers and this was one that I selected--and much better than The Circle by Dave Eggers.

Darknet had some interesting twists, ones I did not see coming. This is really saying something because I have read a whole lot of books and very little surprises me anymore. The pace was pretty fast and I actually read it straight through in less than a day. (Caution: I am a fairly fast reader.) The author gave enough technical information to make the plot believable without going overboard and boring the reader. In fact, if anything, there could have been a bit more of the technical detail.

The author rightly made this a globally set book. Yet the ways in which the various characters know each other, far-flung around the world as they were, seemed entirely believable. This is true even of the Native-American angle, which was quite clever. The backstory on the main characters was woven nicely. And to his credit, I do not think any character was dropped along the way. (Cannot say the same for such blockbuster authors as John Grisham, among others.) So, Kudos to Matthew Mather!

Also, his cautionary tale is a good one. Our technology is outpacing our ability to deal with it reasonably. And Darknet points this out all too well.

I really wanted this book to be good. I really did. Cyberstorm was good enough that my expectations were high.

Alas, they were too high. Much, much, MUCH too high.

This book was terrible. I really hope this book was simply *published* after Cyberstorm, and not *written* after it, because Darknet does not have even a toe to stand on. By the time I was 60% through the book, I wanted to claw my eyes out. The premise was intriguing. The execution failed.

For starters, the writing is so pedantic that even in the middle of a plane crash, I found myself yawning. Rather than hungering to know what happens to the main character thrust (yet again) into the middle of a (supposedly) heart-pounding, thrilling predicament, I found myself thinking, "Just die so this book can move on without you." Not good. The action was NOT heart-pounding. It was NOT thrilling. It was the most boring of ANYTHING I have read in recent years. And it was NONSTOP. Kidnappings, manhunts, chases, shootouts, killings, crashes, murders, betrayals, conspiracy.... You name it, it's in there. I don't think there was a SINGLE chapter that didn't yearn for thrilling. And failed. Miserably. The author demonstrated a complete lack of understanding about the literary device known as a "cliffhanger."

It was chase scene after chase scene with only brief blurbs about dark nets and so little focus on the main theme of the plot that I kept wondering what the book was really about. I never did figure out what the antagonists wanted from the protagonists... or why they so persistently tried to hunt Jake and Jin down. I never got the sense that Jake and Jin were directly involved in anything that was going on... and what was going on was so poorly explained that it wasn't even worth trying to figure out.

There was simultaneously too much detail (e.g. flight school 101 in the middle of a plane crash) and depressingly too little. And what's included is so unrealistic, I couldn't stop rolling my eyes. For instance, how can Jake, who is neither a doctor, lawyer, detective, nor notary, look at a death certificate and instantly know it's legitimate? And signed with a ballpoint pen, to boot? Someone hands ME a death certificate for a guy I met just the other day--signed over a year earlier, no less--and my first thought is not, "This is the real stuff, yep."

The author builds and builds to some kind of epiphany or climax, but it's like a card house, so the moment he stacks something else on top of what has already been established, the whole thing comes tumbling down. It takes us til the last 50 pages to find out why Jake hates his father... and I still don't understand. Why was that important? Is this father a central character or not? Oh, and what did Eamon's "betrayal" add to the story? Um... nothing. Just the inclusion of yet another half-a***d attempt at drama. And more characters. And oh, good grief, how stereotypical 1920's mobster were they?

So many characters. And all of them showed up near the very end, each with their own "charming" little chapter dedicated to their insights... and their importance and/or relationship to Jake or Jin was explained away in a fraction of a paragraph. "Oh, by the way, here's why Sheriff Ralston showed up. Again." He wasn't even a strong enough character to mention the *first* time.

And the revelations? Not shockers. The climax? Honestly, the book just ended. There was "closure," but all the little loose ends were fitted with the sticker bows rather than tied neatly together. Window dressing. Forced. Insincere.

The language is juvenile. This is not a young-adult novel. It's juvenile in the sense that someone nods or "wags their head back and forth" pretty much once a page. Once a page!!! The author feels the need to tell us that someone steps inside, out of the rain coming down outside.... I wasn't aware it rained anywhere else? Jin is kidnapped, and her legs are taped to the chair she's strapped to. I think that's pretty redundant. Which brings me to flow and cohesion. There wasn't any. Jin's captors demand to know who she works for, listing agencies that have no affiliation with anyone important, and while they're interrogating her, we get a nice 2 or 3 page look into her TOTALLY UNRELATED thoughts. And, oh, but wait! Her captors suddenly know alllll about the "secret" organizations that only the Chinese government could know about... But are they Chinese government?

I have no idea. That little story line disappears in a puff of smoke.

The characters are so flat, lifeless, and so unrealistic that I couldn't even bring myself to HATE them, let alone like them. Jin goes from being a weak little piece of meat to resourceful and cunning in about 3 sentences. Jake, too. He starts out as this overpaid, self-entitled business man and in the span of a hike up a mountain, he's the next Dirk Pitt. Sorry, not buying it. As for Jin and Jake's "friendship"?

They met once--at a bar--with a mutual friend--years ago. And each character is so absurdly memorable that when the mutual friend is crushed to death, they each immediately remember the other. Name and everything. No mystery there. "I followed you on social media, so that makes us friends now."

Oh, good grief.

Don't waste your time.

I read this because I liked Cyberstorm so much, but I promise you, this book is Nothing like Cyberstorm. It is incredibly cliche and predictable. I found myself rolling my eyes through most of it; the plot is that ridiculous. Save your money and time and stop after Cyberstorm.

Great book.
Although real people cannot be digitally reproduced at present as they are in the book, I believe that it will be possible in another 5 years. I think that some
Wall Street psychopath is probably funding academic research in this area. You can spoof a real person in social media right now.
Right now autonomous digital stock trading is being done. Digital Autonomous Corporations in the book re possible right now. Bit Coin is an example of this. No one knows who really runs this entity. It is spread all over the world digitally.
The computer hardware, software, and the hacking in the book seem to be currently possible. The way the Wall Street psychopaths and the Banksters use corporations to escape punishment for their many crimes is definitely going on now as it is portrayed in the book.

Darknet is a SCARY book. Any thinking person can realize that the scenarios are not that far from being realistic. In fact, Matthew Mather said that the bitcoins came out right after he wrote this book. However, the most frightening aspect is not the worldwide grasp of each person's lack of privacy or the corporations that are run by computers, but the idea of an assassination market! Someone with a grudge to grind could easily hire someone and remain anonymous. But the entire story was based on the relationships that men had built from childhood. VERY good story line. I hope to read another of his books.

35 pages into the book and I had developed zero interest in the story - book went to local donation center.

Good read. To get my one main complaint out of the way, there's probably just one or two too many "the guy you could trust isn't a guy you can trust" twists. But, it's a quibble. I kept thinking about the classic 1970 (I think) film, Colossus: The Forbin Project. 12 or so years before there was such a thing as a personal computer, that movie envisioned a supercomputer that takes over the world through its control of the USA nuclear weapons array. Ron Howard has wanted to remake it, but its in development hell. This book by Matthew Mather, in many ways, would probably be a better story to film than to try to update Colossus. The book deals, fictionally, with something timely and scary, the idea that the technologies we have made can end up destroying us. This is one of the most frequently employed plot concepts we encounter. It's a Frankenstein story, a story that has been retold in about a million ways. Anyway, I digress. It's a well-written page-turner and hats off to Mather who either knows a lot about the financial system AND about technologies, or he's good at faking it!

A very long book which I kept finding myself skimming because it got so bogged down in terminology and trying to impress the reader.
This book was so bad. It just vomits characters and then abandons them. The ending was horrible and just stopping with no connectivity nor resolutions.
As a reader I was so upset that I threw the book in the trash where it should have been before I paid for it.

Jake is falsely accused of all sorts of crimes including rape and is being pursued by the FBI, Homeland Security, NYPD the Maffia as well as an assassin and nobody believes that he is innocent. Standard thriller stuff. But the twist is that he is also being pursued by an artificial intelligence computer that can tap into public and private records as well as mimic people in video or telephone contacts.

Over several days Jake is beaten up, interrogated, shot at, had ribs broken, been in a plane crash and fallen down a stairwell. He bounces back from each of these mishaps without any apparent slowing down.

The nasty is not the usual government conspiracy but a hedge fund that is using artificial intelligence software to try to take over the world and eliminating anyone who gets in the way. The hedge fund's computer runs the whole thing with very little input from humans.

Jake's best friend is killed and other people start disappearing and it is when Jake's young daughter is kidnapped that he is motivated to fight the hedge fund with the help of nerdy friends and a tribe of Native Americans.

The writing needs some serious editing. It is full of clumsy sentences and errors. For example at one point the gas connection to a stove is described as plastic and a few pages later it is rubber.

Complex and difficult to follow.

I don't know what this book was about.
A difficult plot to follow and far too many characters moving in and out.
Fund managers, cryptocurrency, hackers, yakuza, italian mob, FBI, CIA, NSA, SEC, Chinese Security, Indian tribes, Bank CEO's, Fed Chairman, U.S. Senators, assassin market, assassins, spoofing, jailed brother, drunk parents, foster home, and finally Bluebridge Fund run by an A.I. computer.

What?

Changing human behavior is real just look at the Russians using social networks to change the outcome of an election. Add that to the Bitcoin phenomenon there was a story to be told but Mathew Mather couldn't put it together.

Self published authors need a strong editor..

Skip it.