The Devil's Key

The Kill Order (Sydney Fitzpatrick #5) by Robin Burcell (HarperCollins mass market, 31 December 2013).

Reviewed by Marlyn Beebe.

The Devil's Key is a list of numbers.  An apparently random list of numbers that is actually a computer code that, if found and used, poses a threat to the political and financial security of the U.S., and perhaps even that of the entire world.

Bo Brewer, a young computer technician who buys and resells used copy machines comes across a group that had been used in a government office, and unintentionally disposed of without clearing all the hard drives. Out of sheer curiosity he copies them, and discovers that one has a page with nothing but a list of seemingly random numbers.  As a computer geek, he assumes it's some sort of code, and becomes obsessed with deciphering it.

He shows it to his friend Piper, who happens to have an eidetic memory.  While she's in the apartment above his shop, two men come in and kill him.  Meanwhile, Piper is spirited away by someone who turns out to be FBI agent Zachary Griffin, who is in the early stages of a relationship with Sydney Fitzpatrick.

Sydney had worked in the office the copiers had come from, and might have a copy of the Key.

The situation is made even more complicated by the fact that Sydney's father had been involved in the theft of The Devil's Key twenty years earlier, and had been killed as a result.  One of the investigating officers in the case had been Zach Griffin, who may or may not have fired the lethal bullet.

This complex, fast-paced thriller captures the reader and is very difficult to put down.  Unlike many tales of this sort, the characters are well-developed and have actual Relationships, Personalities and Baggage.  Lots of baggage.

It helps to have read the earlier books in the series, but it's not a necessity.  If you haven't read the first four Sydney Fitzpatrick novels, I can almost guarantee you will find them after you finish this one.  And you won't regret it.


FTC Full Disclosure:  Many thanks to HarperCollins and Edelweiss for providing an e-galley for me to read and review.

This is for all us geeks

By Gayle Carline

One of the nice things about writing genre fiction is that there are organizations that celebrate practically each genre. As a mystery writer, I belong to Sisters in Crime, and lucky for me, there is a chapter in Orange County with monthly meetings. We have all kinds of guest speakers, from other authors to law enforcement experts to ex-CIA operatives. As both a writer and a reader, I find everyone fascinating.

 

This month, we had Daniel McKerren, a man who spent thirty years as a police officer and now works as a freelance investigator with insurance companies, law enforcement, etc, specifically as a computer forensics and data recovery specialist. It was an interesting talk, although it started out, well, I’d call it wonky. You might call it boring.
 

He began by telling us how computers work. They are full of on/off switches called bits and eight bits make a byte and they are arranged in sectors and accessed by pointers in another sector, and so on. As a former software engineer, I kept thinking, “Yeah, yeah, I know, I know, get to the crime solving part.”
 
Stay with me, here.
 

Eventually, I saw the point to his explanations: he had to educate everyone in the room so that his crime-solving discussion would have context. People think they can delete files and no one can ever find them again, even though we see on crime shows that the computer-CSI guys can recover deleted files… but how?
 
It’s all about the pointers. When you delete a file, you are only deleting the pointer to that file. The file contents are still floating around in their sectors, unless and until they are overwritten by a new file. There is something you can do called wiping the disk, which sets all those on/off switches to off, but don’t get cocky—there are still some labs that can use magnetic technology to reset the switches to their last position.
 
In which case, it would suck to be you, if you were trying to hide something.
 

I kind of knew this, but the one thing I didn’t know was the way forensics techs recover data. You see, they don’t just fire up the suspect’s computer and dive in. That’s because every time you start up your computer, you are altering the contents. Hardware and peripheral checks are always performed by the operating system, which results in updating the time stamps.
 
Instead of hitting the Power button, the tech removes the suspect’s hard drive and attaches a device that uses an old-school, read-only DOS program to copy the data to another drive that is read-only. At that point, the data can be extracted and the original hard drive is bagged and tagged.
 
Just hearing that information made me want to run home and re-write a few scenes.

In addition, they have to know how big the hard drive is because their warrant has to be that specific. Dan said if he took a 30G hard drive to a location and the suspect had a 60G drive, he has to go back and get another warrant, which gives the suspect time to try to wipe the drive. Hell, he might even destroy the drive.

 
I don’t know of any way to recover data from a hard drive that’s gone a few rounds in the garbage disposal.

 

I was reminded of Saturday’s post by J.H. Bográn, and how technology can be a stumbling block for thriller/mystery writers. Dan’s talk inspired me to find ways to use technology to my hero’s advantage.

His parting advice? “Technology is advancing at mach speed. When anyone tells you that ‘they can’t get something specific from a computer,’ add the word now to the end of that sentence.”

Any questions, class?

Cyclone Sandy and the Library of Alexandria

By:  Kimberly Hitchens is the founder and owner of Booknook.biz, an ebook production company that has produced books for over 1000 authors and imprints.

So, today, like the rest of the nation, and even the world (which I know because I had concerned emails from many international clients today) I watched the progress of Sandy, the Storm that Ate Manhattan, snacking on Atlantic City on the way, as if it were personally aiming to make Donald Trump's life as miserable as possible.   While watching, for some reason, I was reminded of the fate of the Library of Alexandria, which arguably perished either due to Julius Caesar's careless smoking or Aurelian's attack some 200+ years later, and was finished off by either, or both, Theophilus, carrying out his Pope's decree against "paganism," or Muslims attacking sometime during the Crusades.  (Equal Opportunity Destruction, it seems).  I suppose I was thinking about it due to the possibility that  paper libraries across the Coast could be badly damaged--their books, at least--due to rising flood waters, storm surges, etc.

Not very cheery to think of the last copy of a beloved book being lost to Sandy, is it? If you had a book in paper, on the first floor of a library in Manhattan, your book would be lost.  However, if you had an ebook, you could simply download a new copy of the file.  I know, I know, it is self-serving, isn't it?  But that does not make it any less true.  And, yes, computers can drown as well, or rebel, go on strike, crash, kill off disk drives, and the like. 

"The Computer Ate My Homework"

Some folks will reply with the horror stories—I lost 60k words on my computer, and all that—but nonetheless, a few simple precautions can save your keister.  If you are using certain pieces of software to write with, you can automatically save backup copies of your WIP ("work in progress"), or any other documents.  Liquid Story Binder XE does this; has a built in auto-backup that you can set to backup wherever you want.  My big recommendation has nothing to do with software, per se; it's simply this:  The "cloud" is your friend.  And if you're too paranoid to use the Cloud--think about your thumbs. ;-)  In any event, the message is this:  backup your work to someplace other than your own computer.  It's all well and good to make "backups," but if you backup to the same computer that's going to crash...well, give that some thought.

"The Cloud" is geek-speak for nothing more than servers on the Internet.  That's it.  Nothing sexy, nothing fancy--but it's a computer somewhere else.  Someplace unlikely to suffer the same fate as your computer, whatever that is--crashing, flooding, fire, and the like.  Booknook.biz, for example, has backups in Ireland, Seattle and the East Coast.  I figure if all three go, it's the Apocalypse, anyway, I'm looking for the Four Horseman, and the computers can fend for themselves.  A girl's gotta have her priorities.   

"Oh, Yeah, Sure, Spend More Money"

Ha!  Not only is the cloud your friend, it's free.  You can get free space from Box, Dropbox, SugarSynch or, for big-name companies, how about Amazon?  Amazon will give you up to 5 gigabytes—that is 1,000 megabytes of storage for every gigabyte.  5,000 megabytes.  Given that the average book manuscript is about 250-400 kilobytes, which is 1,000th of a megabyte...suffice it to say you'd have to write the Encyclopedia Britannica, replete with pictures, to start worrying about running out of space on your Amazon Cloud storage.  (Did I say, FREE?) 

"People Will Steal My Stuff If I Put It On The Net!"

Don't trust the Net?  Well, hard to blame you. 
In the alternative, you can buy (and, for that matter, wear if you wish) thumbdrives.  For a few pennies, you can load up 16gigs on a thumbdrive.  I like this one, myself:  Kingston Digital Data Traveler, 16gigs, (with the hole in the end) but to each their own.  I like that one because it's small, not bad-looking, and you can wear it around your neck on a chain if, like me, you misplace "stuff" all the time.  Or a keyring.  This one (pictured, black) is tiny, tiny, tiny: SanDisk Cruzer Fit 16GB.  If it were me, I'd lose it but you more-organized folks might love it.  Unobtrusive, too. Complete peace of mind for under $10.00.  Woot!

See ya next time.

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