Whipsaw by Steve Brewer

Review by Gloria Feit

Whipsaw is the name of a computer game devised by DelaTek, a fledgling firm for which Matt Donahue headed security after leaving the Marine Corps, and which has now become quite successful, making its founder, David LaCosta, very wealthy. Donahue left that firm two years ago after his wife left him for LaCosta, to whom she is now married. Understandably, there is no love lost between the two men. But when LaCosta asks Matt to help him retrieve the stolen source code for Whipsaw as well as the gaming platform built around it, on which virtually the entire future of the company rests, as computer gaming is currently a huge market and the company having invested everything to develop them, Matt has little choice but to agree, since his own financial future is tied up heavily in DelaTek stock. The hackers responsible have demanded a $3 million ransom, specifying that Matt deliver the money. But things of course do not go as planned, and Matt now feels compelled to see the search for the culprits through. Kate Allison, the beautiful head of Systems Security for the firm, lends a hand, and the plot takes off from there. The corpses start to pile up as the chase continues, right up to its exciting finish [despite my having guessed the identity of the Œbad guy‚ before the author identified him].

Steve Brewer, the author of two mystery series, has written a standalone worthy of his prior novels. Whipsaw is a fast-moving, well-written tale. Quibble: there are a couple of points at which the dialogue gets a bit melodramatic and doesn‚t quite ring true, e.g., at one point LaCosta says „Let‚s go save this company,‚ which sort of had the ring of the old „Let‚s put on a show‰ line. But it is a fun and quick read, filled with wonderful descriptions of San Francisco, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.