The Blue Nowhere

The Blue Nowhere by Jeffery Deaver

For this novel, thrill-a-minute author Jeffery Deaver takes on the internet as the main source of horror and terror.  The internet?  What’s so terrible about the internet?  According to Jeffery Deaver, plenty.  First, we must remember that this book was written back in 2001 (13 years, believe it or not, prior to my writing this review).  Back in 2001, personal computers were just starting to really take off and become a “regular” in most households.  It seemed like everyone on the block had their own machine, and some families even had (-gulp-) two of them!  Yes, many were already using online tools such as the world wide web, but high speed connections, chat rooms, and sites where you could upload, download, and view streaming files were just now becoming the norm.

Turns out that there are some odd characters out there in the real/virtual world, and some have no morals nor scruples it would seem.  A network (pardon the pun) of people known as “hackers” are some of the more widely known.  Their passion?  They break into secure files housed by those in authority such as the government and large corporations.  The majority of these hackers don’t really want to do any harm, they just look at overcoming such barriers as a personal challenge.

This story focuses around two such individuals.  One hacks for the sake of enjoyment, but the other is clearly deranged, and is using his knowledge to randomly find people and kill them.  It seems like, at one point prior to this story, there existed a popular virtual, on-line game that existed where you could virtually find people in a virtual world, and the object of the game was to virtually kill them.  Well, our bad guy (known as “Phate”) decides to keep the game going by living out this twisted story in reality, so he’s out breaking into peoples computers, amassing data, stalking them, and killing them.

So the police turn to a “good guy” hacker.  Well, sort of a good guy.  He’s actually in prison.  Why?  For hacking, of course.  Wyatt Gilette is actually a pretty decent fellow.  He’s never really wanted to hurt anyone, and the police realize that they need his brains and expertise to track down “Phate”.

So the story takes us into these bizarre character’s lives and, if anything, we learn a lot about these computer geniuses and their environments.  These “hackers” are serious.  How serious?  Well, whenever they set about for a couple of days of hard core hacking (with basically no sleep), they have to prepare for their session by obtaining several backup computer keyboards.  Why?  Because they type so fast and furious, that they break the keys on the keyboard causing them to have to discard it and move onto another.  When these characters do sleep, they don’t talk in their sleep, they hack in their sleep.  So as we observe them in slumber-land, their fingers are  in fast motion, typing imaginary code as the rest of their body shuts down.

For all of the computer jargon in this book, there are some in the educated field that claim that author Jeffery Deaver gets a lot of his facts wrong about certain details.  That may be true, but that never seemed to bother me (I remember Peter Benchley, the author of “Jaws” making such claims about the Spielberg movie.  Most, like me, didn’t care since it was so enjoyable).  Deaver also includes a handy glossary at the beginning of the book so we can easily refer to many of terms, jargon and acronyms that are second nature to computer nerds.

There’s a lot of cat and mouse chasing in this book.  It’s difficult to hide and try to find people in the virtual world.  I mean, how can I use my computer to find your location if you have access to my computer and you know that I’m trying to use it to find your location?  So there’s a lot of “we found him!” and then “He somehow escaped!”, but I still really enjoyed the high speed online world that Deaver takes us to.  I can also see how one can easily become paranoid of the online world of computers thinking that there really could be people such as this out there lurking behind every virtual door.

I found this book to be very similar to a lot of what Jeffery Deaver has written, but there were so many fresh angles and new corners to peak in, that I still found this book to be a great, wild read - even though it may be a bit “dated” all these years later.