James R. Strickland

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This book is full steam ahead cyber punk goodness. I think there is a misstep at 3/4 of the way in. At that point some of the reveals felt more like tricks to me and I started to get disappointed. Before I could flip the off switch, "Looking Glass" revved back up. I really enjoyed the ending. A tough-as-nails female protagonist, secret conspiracies that make sense, and a future world that I can almost touch. Wonderful debut by James Strickland.

The story is basically about a female network administrator who fights hacking of the worst kind. If you fail, you die. And if you succeed then you wipe someone's mind away. It's a terrible case of job burn-out. Everything is going normally, burning the baddies until one day someone appears that can read their minds. At least it seems that way. Jump left, get burnt. Jump right, already waiting there for you. What do you do? And the worst part is that it's hard to tell what/who is real anymore.

It might seem like a retread of older cyberpunk novels if you're looking just on the surface, but "Looking Glass" is not. This reflection goes much deeper.

Overall one of the most satisfying reads in a long time. I really do recommend this book, even to non-techies.… (més)

Rachel Santana is thirty-six years old. She’s an agent for Interpol Covert Services. Before that, she was an interrogator at the White Sands Reeducation Camp, following the breakup of the United States. Before that, she was a prisoner there. Before that, a Yankee, one of a group of corporate mercenaries trying to extract something like a victory in the Middle East. Before that, she was a United States Marine. She’s a survivor. A cop. A soldier. A destroyer. A killer.
Now, Robert Neil, Rachel’s boss and soon-to-be ex-husband, has implanted a digital copy of Rachel’s mind in Michelle Marie (Micki) Blake, a 16-year-old farmgirl-hacker in rural Kansas. The mission: Learn the local hacker ecology. Locate the dangerous new player prowling the rural networks. Destroy him. Take no prisoners. Leave no incriminating evidence. As covert missions go, it should be pretty simple.
There’s nothing simple, though, about being conjoined at the cortex with someone else.

There’s nothing simple about life on the farm, the life of a high school student, the life of a 16-year-old in post-United States Kansas.

And the rural hacker ecology is unraveling with new forces in play, new powers, new players. It will take all of Rachel’s experience just to survive. All of Micki’s skills as a hacker to dig for the truth. All of their combined abilities to put the pieces together, to find the real threat despite the web of deception and half-truth that surrounds both their operation and Copy-Rachel’s very existence.

And somehow, they have to avoid being grounded.… (més)

Looking Glass is set in the not too distant future, in a gritty, unrefined, shattered North America, torn apart by civil war and terrorism. Hackers and IT security technicians fight a different kind of war in cyberspace, the global network we know today as the Internet. A serial killer appears in this deadly game of mouse, and the killer has found a way to use the network to reach inside his victim’s brains, and use these brains as his weapon. Death is painful and swift, and there is no defense.
“Shroud” is the online name of Dr. Catherine Farro. She is a security network team leader for a large retail company. Shroud is a paraplegic, but in the realm of cyberspace, inside a sensory deprivation tank and “jacked in” to the network, she is fast, nimble, and ruthless. She is self-described as “frosty” when she is busy bringing the fight to the hackers.

Shroud is just beginning her shift when the killer strikes for the first time. She survives, but her entire team is dead or missing. She is exiled from her corporate resources while the company to which she has given so much has turned against her in a tempest of crisis management. Despite the obstacles in her path, she is bent on vengeance, and her search for the mysterious, anonymous killer is fraught with peril and overwhelming odds… (més)