The Cloud Collector

September 7, 2015
The in-depth knowledge of the espionage business that Freemantle (The Namedropper) brings to this fly-on-the-wall look at the technical and bureaucratic aspects of the spy world helps compensate for the novel’s lack of excitement. CIA officer Jack Irvine, who heads a mission known as Operation Cyber Shepherd, and his operators troll the “darknets” of cyberspace searching for terrorist groups. Once Irvine and company hack into these groups, they uncover attack plans, turn various terrorists against one another, and alert security agencies. Working with smart, stubborn British MI5 agent Sally Hanning, Irvine racks up several conspicuous successes—thwarting attacks on the Coliseum in Rome, a nuclear reactor in Sellafield, England, and the Washington Monument in the U.S.—but mastermind terrorist Ismail al Aswamy escapes. Irvine’s most dangerous foes are members of his own team and hostile politicians who need these government cyber warriors to cover their own asses. This realistic, disheartening thriller may be too downbeat for some fans of the genre.

October 1, 2015
NSA hacker Jack Irvine has penetrated the Iranian intelligence service's computer network. He has identified some jihadists and follows them on Facebook, and he has even planted disinformation that spurs one jihadist cell to slaughter another. Bits of intelligence Irvine has discovered allow British MI5 analyst Sally Hanning to divine and then thwart coordinated attacks on the U.S., Britain, and Italy. But more attacks follow, and a man spooks think is the mastermind has slipped CIA surveillance and is loose in the U.S. The Cloud Collector seems to be veteran espionage novelist Freemantle's first foray into the world of jihad, and the results are mixed. He works hard to explain Irvine's accomplishment, but readers not fluent in darknets and botnets will likely struggle. But carefully detailed scenes of managers of myriad U.S. intelligence agencies clashing in meetings read like verbal knife fights and have a dispiriting plausibility. Some of the managers are covering up their own failures. Others are pushing careerist agendas, or simply reflexively doing bureaucratic battle against rivalswhile the jihadist mastermind plans something even more sinister.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)