Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This story has over a hundred four and five star reviews and frankly I have no idea how that's possible. It makes me wonder if we read the same book. Comparing this book to the Bourne Identity, to the Medici Dagger, or to any of Dan Browns books is about like comparing a Yugo to a Porsche. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me set the scene: A hacker, an FBI agent, and a researcher at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) get embroiled in a plot by a secret society with roots back to the 1300's to destroy the world with an improved strain of the bubonic plague. How could you not be hooked by story like this? Chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, I love it all. I work with computers and am a history buff so believe me when I say I was frothing at the mouth to read this book. My anticipation turned to surprise and finally dismay when chapter after chapter introduced science that's simply not possible, contradictory plot lines, and characters doing and saying things I simply don't believe they would say or do based on the description of that character. The editing was really bad as well. Several places have incorrect (though similar in spelling) words. Wrong or missing punctuation and in a few places it seemed the last couple of words in the sentence were left out. Honestly this was the least of the story's problems so that's all I'll say about it. It is clear the author has no understanding of basic science nor did even rudimentary research before writing this story. I'm not going to list everything she got wrong but some are simply unforgivable. The worst being magnets used to deflect bullets. This is impossible as lead, being a non ferrous metal, is not attracted to magnets. A simple Google search "will a magnet stick to lead" took 5 seconds and the very first link gave the answer. Another being when the hacker's assistant drops her computer into liquid nitrogen to make it run faster. The speed of a computer is a setting on the main board and does not change based on the its temperature. The only thing submerging your computer in liquid nitrogen will accomplish is to turn it into a brick. Instantaneous vaccines simply don't exist. Once vaccinated, the body takes time to recognize the disease and produce and antibodies for it. For example, the H1N1 vaccine takes between two to three weeks. It's simply not possible for a vaccine to protect one from a disease 20 minutes after injection. Hacking and cryptography are not synonymous. This is a Hollywood "fact". As a "techno" novel about a hacker you'd think the author would try to get some basic knowledge about the subject before writing about it. Am I nit picking? Each of these errors is critical to the plot; if any of them don't work the story has a very different and unhappy ending. I don't expect any book to be perfect but there's no excuse for missing details that make the rest of the story impossible or a character doing something so out of character the whole story comes to a stop. At one point a character gets broken ribs, yet hours later we see him fighting hand to hand, jumping off castle walls, riding a war horse, and climbing up a collapsed ceiling, all with no problem or ill effect. In fact, broken ribs are never mentioned again in the story at all. In another, the FBI agent is trying to trace the hacker who has bounced her signal through "dozens of satellites". The FBI's assistant shows all the bounces spell out a message. For this to be possible, they most have the source location (I.e. the hacker's location) rendering all the signal bouncing irrelevant. When the FBI agent starts to cry, after the bad guy whom he has been trying to catch for some time gets away, I just had to laugh. The story concept was fantastic unfortunately the authors reach far exceeded her grasp. Page after page of bad or impossible technology, glaring plot holes, and incongruous characters turned it into nothing more than a laughable farce. If you like tight plots without contradictions, characters whose actions make sense and "high tech" that completely don't break the laws of physics this book is not for you. If I could have given it a zero star rating I would have.