The burning wire - Jeffery Deaver

The first Jeffery Deaver book I read was The Blue Nowhere . It was about the police trying to catch a man who was hacking into a person's computer and using that to kill people. It was recommended by a colleague who is a Jeffery Deaver fan. I have to admit he chooses interesting subjects for his books.

About the book
The Burning Wire is a Lincoln Rhyme novel, about the hunt for a man or group who has taken  over New York's electricity grid and diverting the "juice" to electrocute people. I've not read a Lincoln Rhyme novel before and was surprised to learn he is a quadriplegic. It took a while to get over wanting to know how he became wheel chair bound. I'm sure it's in one of the earlier novels.

My thoughts
The writing is quite clever. Just when I started to fear for any unconnected character who appeared in the story, he went and changed the formula! There is a neat little twist towards the end, which would have been picked up earlier by a more discerning reader. I wasn't really thinking about where the story was going, so it surprised me!

The reason I chose this book is because the idea of taking over the electricity grid sounded really interesting. I wasn't disappointed in this regard. It also pokes fun at the reliance of "new age" intelligence agents relying on cloud computing for their intelligence, over the old school running of snitches.

The only thing I didn't really like about the novel is that after the crime was solved there were still about 50 pages of the book to go. They were spent wrapping up loose ends, but it just seemed to go on too long.