Title: God of the Internet
Author: Lynn Lipinski
Publisher: Majestic Content Los Angeles
ISBN: 9780996467629
Pages: 255
Genre: Thriller / Crime / Suspense
Reviewed by: Joe Kilgore
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Pacific Book Review
Apropos of the times in which we live, Lipinski has constructed a thriller based on elements that are intricately intertwined today—the Internet, the family, and terrorism. In this fast paced potboiler, digital derring-do shares page space with familial obligations and international intrigue. The result is an engaging story often as credible as it is suspenseful.
Juliana is the central character swept into a raging current of potentially catastrophic events. She’s a Los Angeles wife and mother with more than enough problems of her own. Her oldest son suffers from hydrocephalous and has been consistently in and out of hospitals for most of his seventeen years. This routine shows no signs of abating. Her daughter is a typical California teen with all the angst that obviously implies. Her husband is not only her boss at the UCLA computer network security project where they
work, he’s also a brilliant, narcissistic, philandering louse prone to ending their arguments with the back of his hand Divulging too much of the plot would take away much of the fun of hanging on as this adventure careens from one upheaval to the next. All one really needs to know is that a dastardly villain has found a way to turn the Internet into an object of destruction. This secretive evildoer is threatening to destroy various world infrastructures if demands are not met to remove all Western forces from operations in the Middle East. He uses the City of Angels as a test-case example of his ability to carry out his threats. Juliana and her family, an oddball group of computer hackers, plus the FBI and Homeland Security are all involved in trying to isolate and eliminate a heinous Internet worm while uncovering and dispatching the person responsible for it.
The author does a good job of creating both sympathetic and psychotic characters. Readers will easily identify with the demands Juliana is put under and the emotions she must control as she fights to save those she loves and herself. While it may seem impossible to empathize with the actions of the Internet transgressor, Lipinski at least makes his motives understandable.
The novel unfolds in the present tense. An attempt, one assumes, to create both a ripped-from-the-headlines feel as well as a pace energizer. This can sometimes be distracting when remembrances are enacted and tenses collide less artfully than they might. However, the involving detail of the computer machinations are pulled off in a way that make it reasonable to believe digital Armageddon may indeed be only a keystroke away. All in all, this is a fun read for today’s fast times.
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