Updegrove, The Doodlebug War

This weekend, as the American election looms and the market “fear index” has spiked, I’m going to write about two thrillers, one fiction, the other (Lucifer’s Banker) less apocalyptic but unfortunately real.

Andrew Updegrove is back with his third Frank Adversego book, The Doodlebug War: A Tale of Fanatics and Romantics. His second book, The Lafayette Campaign, about hackers shaping a presidential election, was eerily prescient. Let’s hope this one isn’t.

I should note in passing that my review of The Lafayette Campaign wouldn’t qualify me for the political prognosticators hall of fame. I envisaged Donald Trump running as a third party candidate and siphoning votes from the Republican Party. Oh well….

Frank Adversego is a cyber-security expert, this time working madly to protect our massive data storage centers (apparently the largest buildings have over 25 acres of floor space) from annihilation by terrorists. The problem? “The more servers, software, and data you put in a single building, and the more buildings you put near each other, the bigger the target you create. The more everything moves to cloud computing, the more vulnerable we get, especially since the servers that support the Internet and the electrical grid are all hosted in data centers, too.”

The Doodlebug War is a page-turner and, at $0.99, a cheap way to be scared of something other than the outcome of Tuesday’s election.