Under suspicion for a virtual break-in at Fort Knox, 17-year-old Carl Hobbes finds himself on a rendition flight for questioning by the US military. Taken to an isolated camp in the Arctic wilderness, dedicated to holding terrorists-for-hire, the boy finds all assurances about his safety blow away when one notorious detainee stages an uprising. Cut off from civilisation, and with overnight temperatures plummeting, Hobbes must decide whether his chances of survival are greater inside the cage - or out...

2007-12-20 The research is there but the book doesn't really work

Matt Whyman clearly did a great a lot of research on hacking for this book, because he takes a lot of time explaining how hacking can be done and coming up with a credible way in which the protagonist, Carl Hobbes, is able to open the Fort Knox bank vault. In that respect, I found the book to be interesting and learnt a lot from it.

Unfortunately, Whyman is so interested in showing his research and drawing a parallel between how hackers hack and how Hobbes can get out of his predicament, that I didn't find myself gripped by the story. This was partly also due to the fact that much of the set-up to the plot requires Hobbes to be gullable and naive, which is at odds with the smart teen that Whyman wants to show you.

For example, we're told that Hobbes is aware of Guantanomo Bay and what rendition is, yet when he is first arrested in the UK for having hacked into Fort Knox, he has no qualms about agreeing to voluntarily fly out of the country for interrogation by the US in an unspecified location (believing that they will return him once their questions are answered). We're further required to believe that the legal aid lawyer representing him would recommend this as a good cause of action (on the basis that otherwise he'd only be extradited on his 18th birthday anyway), even though she knows that the US government won't document the deal being done. It's a bit much to buy into, and it's further strained by Hobbes being incredibly slow on the uptake as to what's really happening to him, even when he finds himself being led into an internment camp in the Arctic Circle.

I found myself further unable to buy into Hobbes because of the language that Whyman chooses to use in the first person narration. For a teenage boy, he doesn't use much slang and I found his dialogue to be more appropriate to a 30-something computer programmer (even during the interrogation scenes where we learn how he managed to carry out his crime). There were also nitpicks about his vocabularly (would a 17 year old use the word "perish" to describe a man's death?)

There's v. little attempt to flesh out the other characters, of whom Williams, the agent assigned to liaise with Hobbes, is probably the best drawn. McCoy, the mercenary psychopath is brutal in a cardboard cut out way and Stagger and Stedman (camp commandant and would-be suicide bomber) are little more than words on the page and needed to be developed further. Whyman hints at a romance angle with Beth, but there's too little interaction between her and Hobbes to justify it.

There's a lot of violence in the book, with explosions and shootings galore, but Hobbes doesn't really react to any of it in a believable way. I was also surprised at the complete lack of profanity (which only struck me because the violence was unstinting).

Whyman leaves an open ending, which struck me as absurd given the circumstances his characters find themselves in (but which I won't spoil). I suspect this is to leave room for a sequel, although I'm not particularly interested in reading one.