Jack and her husband, Gabe, are professional security analysts — pen-testers, red-teamers. Their job is to test the security measures of companies, both digital and physical, to find weaknesses. After one case goes a little sideways and Jack is briefly arrested, she arrives home exhausted to find her husband brutally murdered. Calling for the police, she finds herself again in the station being questioned, but increasingly believes the cops are trying to pin the deed on her. She’s had an acrimonious relationship with them ever since dating one of their number and discovering him to be a controlling psychopath: for months after she dumped him she was subject to frequent traffic stops and no-knock raids. Weighing the odds, Jack bolts.

In a way, she grimly reflects, this would be easier if she had brutally murdered her husband, because she would have had a plan in place. Cash, clothes, supply stashes. As it is now, she’s a woman without a phone or cash, trying to navigate a technocratic and increasingly unhuman world. She’s armed with her wits and deep experience in getting around physical barriers and subtly manipulating strangers into helping her, though. After a frantic race back home, she uses her infil skills to access the house from the back, where she spots the evidence of a break-in that the Metro people missed in their easy-option decision to get the wife. Unfortunately in her departure — the cops arrive to begin searching the house and formally arrest her — Jack is injured. Over the next week, Jack is constantly being hunted for by the cops while at the same time she’s trying to figure out why someone would have murdered her dear husband. There are clues: a missing hard drive at home, the arrival of a life insurance policy for her husband with someone else’ phone number on it. Jack finds some shelter with her sister and her and Gabe’s mutual friend Cole, but given the amount of heat she’s drawing, she can’t stay long — and as her investigation continues, as she begins growing weaker from the injury that’s getting infected while she’s desperately trying to find the truth and evade the cops, her searches attract the attention of the party responsible for this drama to begin with.

Given my interests in IT & cybersecurity, I enjoyed this far more than I expected to when I was only a quarter in. Ware included a lot of really petty and intricate details that slowed the narrative down, but this began getting useful when Jack’s investigation begins to grow. Far as as I can tell, this is the first of Ware’s books to have a strong technical-thriller compotent, (The IT Girl was a red herring) and this could be an education in the social engineering side of cybersecurity for casual readers. At one point, Jack needs to review the strange life-insurance policy’s account details to see if Gabe really took out the policy: she uses social media stalking and a series of impersonations and spoofs to get into the building and pull up account details, where a serious twist for the reader is in store. This is an area of cybersecurity that absolutely fascinates me, but it’s useful for everyone to know about given the amount of profile cloning that goes on, and the many ways we accidentally volunteer information to threat actors — from sharing and showing too much on social media (check your privacy settings!) to engaging in useful but dumb-risky moves like leaving passwords around in open view. (One character in this appeared to have a modicum of wariness: she hid her passwords in a Rolodex file, under a nondescript name.) The small details became increasingly useful, like Jack noticing that four keys in a pad were more worn than others, allowing her to simply begin cycling through the 16 available combinations. For lay readers, this offers a look into a very accessible side of information security and defense that requires little technical knowledge at all, unlike the very technical exploits used in Mark Russonovich’s tech-thrillers.

I’ll definitely be trying Ware again, though I realize the rest of her works don’t touch on computer goodness like this.

Related:
The “Little Brother” series, including Little Brother and Homeland, followed by Attack Surface. All involve heavy amounts of cyber/computer activity.
Mark Russonovich’s Zero Day and Trojan Horse, two cybersecurity thrillers written by a programmer
There is No Cloud and Cloud Judgement, thrillers with a strong cybersecurity element — though not nearly as technical as Russonovich.