Spyder Web By Tom Grace -Hardcover book and similar items

Spyder Web By Tom Grace Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Review Tom Grace, a Michigan architect, wrote his first thriller in his spare time, in between designing research facilities for IBM and the University of Michigan. That explains why it has both a cool, careful structure and the feel of a solid foundation of scientific research behind its many scenes of absorbing action. Ex-Navy SEAL Nolan Kilkenny has just begun work at his father's online research facility called MARC (for Michigan Applied Research Consortium) when two high-level hackers steal a CIA device called Spyder and turn it loose on MARC in a test of its strength. Spyder is the ultimate hacking program, with the ability to sniff out every byte of supposedly classified data on the Internet and make it public--creating a financial disaster for the Kilkennys as well as a potential threat to world order. Using his old SEAL killing skills and his recently acquired cybersnooper abilities, Nolan sets about solving both problems at once. Grace knows enough about designing thrillers that function on visceral as well as intellectual levels to keep the action flowing along with the technical jargon. If you've been wondering where the next generation of Tom Clancys is going to come from, direct your gaze to Ann Arbor and environs. --Dick Adler --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers Weekly The sizzle of a good thriller is missing from this originally self-published debut, even though Grace fuses brawny action-hero derring-do with brainy computer hacking. After one final mission of government-sanctioned vengeance, Navy SEAL Nolan Kilkenny, who lives in Ann Arbor, Mich., is eager to get to work for his father's pet project, an online research clearinghouse called MARC (Michigan Applied Research Consortium). Meanwhile, thanks to a financially vulnerable CIA agent, data thieves Alex Roe and Ian Parnell have gotten their hands on Spyder, a CIA prototype of the ultimate hacking program?and they've chosen MARC's mainframe as their test target. Naturally, Kilkenny discovers the theft, and his SEAL talents are called upon to ward off worldwide technological disaster. Despite Grace's use of seemingly every thriller component in the business?Asian killers, Navy SEALs, KGB defectors, high-tech pirates?in scenes that take the reader from Ann Arbor to Puerto Rico, Haiti and London, this novel is curiously devoid of thrills. The SEAL action scenes read like a Muzak version of Richard Marcinko's. The language is jargon-larded without actually explaining the technology. The plot is promising, but Grace's pacing impedes it. By cutting back and forth among the main players, he succeeds not in ratcheting up suspense but only in fracturing a reader's attention. Agent, Esther Margolis. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.