Fragments

[martin]

131ah-Rogers-Beale-Grand-Fyodor-FX-Craig-Thor-Parker, Syngress, 2004{smile}
"Stealing the Network: Owning the Box" was written as a collection of short, independent, stories, while the sequel "StN: Owning a Continent" is written as one long novel with a single plot going through it all. It's much more violent; I mean, people actually die in significant numbers. I think they may have overdone the storyline slightly, but the technical descriptions are still very, very good. There's very little repetition or overlap from the first StN book. We do meet the same characters as in the first book, but now they do other things, using other tools. Anyway, I couldn't put it down. To me, it's comparable to Dan Brown's books, but much more technically accurate, which, to me, is more important that good suspense writing (which, honestly, I don't find Dan Brown does very well).

Both StN books have a very consistent, and great, writing style all through the book (as I said: better than Dan Brown), so I really don't believe all these hackers, each writing their own chapter, did this on their own. It matters not in the least, but there's definitely a shadow writer behind all this. A good one, at that.

Just one little thing: after all was said and done, I still didn't get where all the money actually came from. I probably didn't pay attention at the crucial moment.