I’m really split on this. On one hand, especially in the first quarter of the book, it is extremely low brow commercial fiction, replete with douche bag bad guys who behave badly and that’s how you know they’re bad. It’s melodramatic, maybe unintentionally? Hard to say. Very Live Free or Die Hard vibes, but structured as a much more complex techno-thriller and more protagonists. It’s high-octane and filled with Bond Villain Dialogue too, though. He raced out of the house just before fire “literally” erupted from every window. That kind of stuff.

It does get better, however. As the daemons plan begins to pop off and the intricacies of the plotting become apparent, in tandem with a better-than-average distillation of the technical aspects to what is happening. From MMOs to network security to darkweb stuff, it always felt pretty clear and reasonable we’ll researched; at least, to this laymen. There is the fun omnipresence trope popularized in cyberpunk lit; which, this often seems to be categorized as. I think it’s actually much more a techno thriller than anything else, considering it’s vaguely punk that the daemon targets capital in a kind of anarchism, and the main protagonists are cops and a white hat hacker.

Subsequently, the main antagonists to whatever punk ethos might exist… are the primary narrators. It’s interesting and maybe straddles the line of a present day cyberpunk classification. The main issue, for me, is that while it targets corporations and plays the game or capitalism to do so, it’s not actually interested in portraying the values, just using them as factions waging a war. There’s no voice for the marginalized and it’s too busy describing the ways in which technology is being weaponized in one way or another against each side, it actually doesn’t feel about socio economic circumstances.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty fun (when it isn’t dropping lines that make my eyes roll back into my head, especially when they’re in MMOs), but it the intelligence of the work, imo, is found in the competency with technology and the plotting, and the swapping around of protagonists. Otherwise it may as well be Dean Koontz or James Patterson, David Baldacchi,etc., just with this very particular niche.

3.5 rounded up (for the moment)