Ian Sutherland (1)

If you are from the era before social media and the WWW you may become a little less trusting and a little more paranoid after reading this novella.

Brody Taylor plays on people’s willingness to help and their belief that most people are honest and sincere to get the information he needs to infiltrate a company. It’s a sad and dangerous world we now inhabit.

Cleverly plotted and all very plausible, Brody Taylor is a white hat hacker and goes through step by step how he hacked into a company’s computer system.

Social Engineer is number one in the Brody Taylor series and as a novella is a tantalising taste of what to expect in the rest of the series.

And it’s not all geeky IT talk; with a touch of romance added it’s perfect for the novice technology user.… (mais)

Wow again! Sutherland delivers an exciting and engaging thriller that is current with technology and the events of the day. I have read his other two books and I was glad to see all of the characters brought forward into this new mystery. Additionally, the premise of the terrorist attack is plausible and realistic with an attack vector that I hope does not exist in the real world. I continue to be impressed with how Sutherland weaves technical concepts into the novel and then explains them for the less technical crowd.
Taking up Serpents is a great read that I struggled to put down. Highly recommended!… (mais)

Invasion Of Privacy is snappily written by someone who certainly sounds as if he knows his cyber stuff but has a sharp enough turn of phrase to deliver the technobabble in entertaining and enlightening byte-size chunks. The heroine defies genre stereotyping. She’s a female detective who is smart, competent and charismatic – and doesn’t have to spend nine-tenths of her time fighting institutional bigotry (although she’s inevitably more capable than her inexperienced ranking officer).

Her hacker counterpart, whose challenge to take down a voyeur web unexpectedly entangles him in a homicide investigation, is also likable and credible guy. And they all share great taste in coffee, and reference exactly the right cultural icons. Far from giving up by chapter three, as is so often the case with cyber-crime novels, I found my reading pace picking up as the plot grew more tangled and as the serial killer came closer to choosing his next victim…
(There's more thoughts on the plot and characters over at
http://murdermayhemandmore.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/invasion-of-privacy-the-dark... )

The author keeps the pace trotting along which is an admirable accomplishment given that he’s also explaining some fairly sophisticated web security systems and the concept of ‘human hacking’. So even if you personally know nothing about tech stuff and web bots then that shouldn’t spoil your enjoyment, or your understanding of the plot and the growing danger which surrounds the investigators. There’s also a convincingly chilling villain, and a bunch of other bad guys who bring a real sense of menace to proceedings.

An accomplished thriller; one which leaves an obvious opening for a sequel and I’d be delighted to read that too. Sutherland has a talent for exploring the underbelly of the internet, and I look forward to exploring the dark web through his next story.
8/10… (mais)