Book details of 'The Hanged Man's Song'

Title	The Hanged Man's Song
Author(s)	John Sandford
ISBN	0399151397
Language	English
Published	November 2003
Publisher	Putnam Pub Group

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'The Hanged Man's Song':

Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
Just about everybody knows John Sandford for his long and successful Prey series. But just as well written and maybe more fun are his Kidd books, of which this is the fourth. Kidd is a professional thief for the Internet age: a cyberprowler, a hacker extraordinaire. In The Hanged Man's Song, he gets word that one of his key contacts--a superhacker known only as Bobby, whom Kidd has never met but has relied on many times--has disappeared. Kidd and an old buddy, both of whom could be compromised by data in Bobby's files, go looking for him. Finding his brutally murdered body draws them into a Hitchcock-esque intrigue that eventually involves stolen government secrets, crooked politicians, and a rogue CIA agent who's as crafty as he is creepy. While filling his tale with fascinating and authentic-sounding lore about the hacker subculture, identity theft, and security cracking, Sandford keeps the action brisk with plenty of white-knuckle chases, tense stakeouts, and hairsbreadth escapes. Couple that with a smart, agreeable narrator and a cast of vivid characters evoked with an old pro's ease, and you've got one winning thriller.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
It is always a delight to find a new John Sandford/John Camp novel, a pleasure that is unalloyed by any regrets and annoyances in regard to technical goofs. As was the quality of the technical material in "The Fool's Run" (see reviews) and "The Devil's Code" (see reviews), so it is with "The Hanged Man's Song." The technology is firmly grounded in reality. The communities, both blackhat and law enforcement, do not have the jarring quality found in all too many works where the author becomes fascinated with "hackers." (Having lugged around a number of "development" laptops in order to demonstrate company products, I was wryly glad to find that someone else knows that not *all* such machines are featherweights :-) There is an intriguing idea for distributed backup of secure-but-secret data, although I suspect that even very young computer wizards would very quickly act to close loopholes and find anomalies. I'm a bit surprised that a careful and paranoid group, such as is described in the novel, did not take more care with authentication, perhaps through a "web of trust" model, but I suppose that would have gotten in the way of the plot. Onion routing would also have been handy for these people, but, again, would not be as exciting. (I also want to get my hands on that quad track DVD-R: the best I can find for my own systems is the basic single track that only lays down 5-6 gigs.) The main complaint I would have with this particular work is that the technology seemed somehow divorced from the primary thread of the plot. This seems an odd statement to make, given the three-cornered race by technically savvy people, turning primarily on computer forensics and data recovery, but I was left feeling that this was more akin to an old-fashioned chase thriller. Albeit an interesting one. copyright Robert M. Slade, 2003
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