Hooked

Nat Idle, a San Francisco writer with a medical degree, narrowly survives an explosion in an Internet café after a stranger hands him a note warning him to exit immediately.The handwriting on the note belongs to his deceased girlfriend, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist whom he has obsessively been mourning. So begins HOOKED, a pop thriller for the Internet Age, written with the force of an adrenaline rush and the pace of an intimate email dispatch you can't stop reading. Each chapter of this novel will keep readers hooked as Nat Idle searches for the love of his life in the midst of manipulation and conspiracy.From Publishers WeeklyThis oddly flat thriller from first-time novelist Richtel opens with a warning in a dead girlfriend's handwriting, followed by an explosion in a San Francisco cafe. Nat Idle, who barely escapes, is perplexed by the note: his girlfriend Annie--from a very wealthy family involved in various opaque concerns--was swept off her sailboat four years ago and never seen again. Nat tracks down survivors of the blast, including waitress Erin Coultran, whose actions make Nat suspicious; when the home of aspiring novelist Simon Anderson, another survivor, catches on fire, Nat's suspicions intensify. Nat's investigations take him to Strawberry Labs, Annie's family company possibly named after Annie's childhood Labrador retriever. Despite intentionally short chapters à la The Da Vinci Code, Richtel (who writes the comic strip Rudy Park under nom de plume Theron Heir) has trouble bringing Nat to life or tension to the plot--in part because of Nat's first-person flashbacks to his relationship with Annie. Richtel's trying to do a brainy update of classic noir, but falls slightly short.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistNat Idle is a romantic. After finishing medical school, he abandons further training to become a freelance journalist; and he falls in love with Annie Kindle as soon as he hears her laugh. She is taken with his romanticism, even though her father, the alpha shark in Silicon Valley's venture capital sea, is grooming her to become his "smiling assassin." But Annie is lost in a sailing mishap, and four years later, Nat is still infatuated, still mourning. So, when a pretty woman leaves him a note in an Internet cafe, he follows her out the door--and escapes a lethal bomb blast. The note was written in Annie's distinctive hand. The scientist in Nat won't believe that Annie is still alive, but he begins to investigate the blast and finds himself immersed in Silicon Valley intrigue. Fully two-thirds of Hooked is a shrewd cinematic thriller, filled with knowing insights about San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and the wired-wireless world. But Richtel, a reporter for the New York Times, stumbles a bit as the story unfolds into an uberplot to turn us all into Internet addicts. Still, many readers will happily suspend disbelief and simply enjoy the yarn. Thomas GaughanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved