Darknet - Matthew Mather (english version)

Disclaimer: English is my third language, and this is my second attempt to do a review in this language, so I want to apologize in advance for there may be mistakes in the text below. If you find any, please let me know so that I can correct it. I'd really appreciate it. Thanks. You can read this review also in Spanish here.

Matthew Mather is the author of Cyberstorm, a quite entertaining novel that shows a post-apocalyptic situation in the city of New York, and Atopia, an excellent (that has unfairly gone unnoticed in Spain) science fiction story, which I thoroughly enjoyed, about the uses of virtual reality. Both novels are self-published. When I discovered that Mather had written a new book, Darknet, I bought it without hesitation and started reading it with great interest, but unfortunately the interest waned, and as a summary I must say that I am disappointed.

The beginning of this techno-thriller is very promising: several people involved in the investigation of investment funds die in ways that seem accidental, but the situation ends up triggering some alarms in a couple of government agencies and in the brains of the protagonists of the history. It seems that the cause is a complex computer program used to plagiarize the appearance, behavior and responses of some human beings.

Jake from United States and Jin from China will try to fight this software and the humans that work for it without knowing that they are working for a machine.

So far so good, but the problem is that all the efectiveness and ruthlessness that presented the program and its mercenaries seems to disappear when faced with our protagonists. Maybe I’m getting old, but stories with unlikely heroes without no preparation that are able to survive the most adverse circumstances are really tiring me. Jin and Jake are able to escape when they are captured by government agencies, survive shootings, trick professional murderers, land planes in emergencies, and do harrowing treks in extreme weather conditions ... and that only till half of the book. Too many scenes of this style; even considering that I'm reading fiction it surpasses all my tolerance parameters and credibility and, contrary to what the author was trying, have have caused me to get off interest in the novel.

Anyway, if you like techno-thrillers with lots of action I will recommend you Darknet: the plot is entertaining, it’s well written, there is tension (although the author abuses of cliffhangers), is a perfect reading to do among other books a little more complex. It has all the ingredients to become a bestseller and I daresay it was written thinking about becoming a movie. It is not very different from many other thrillers of this style I have read and more or less liked, but I think I have not read it at the right time. Surely if I was a few years younger I would have liked it more. For only 3 dollars I suggest you to check it yourselves.