Hooked: A Thriller About Love and Other Addictions | Matt Richtel

Hooked: A Thriller About Love and Other Addictions | Matt Richtel | Great beginning, but hard to follow in the end

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Hooked: A Thriller...

	Hooked: A Thriller About Love and Other Addictions Matt Richtel Twelve, 2007 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 47 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Nat Idle, a San Francisco writer with a medical degree, narrowly survives an explosion in an Internet café after a stranger hands him a note warning him to exit immediately.
The handwriting on the note belongs to his deceased girlfriend, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist whom he has obsessively been mourning. So begins HOOKED, a pop thriller for the Internet Age, written with the force of an adrenaline rush and the pace of an intimate email dispatch you can't stop reading. Each chapter of this novel will keep readers hooked as Nat Idle searches for the love of his life in the midst of manipulation and conspiracy.

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Hooked

Matt Richtel's storyline and character development are absolutely terrific. What a great read! Let's hope there's more to come from this talented writer.

Great beginning, but hard to follow in the end

The opening scene of Matt Richtel's Hooked is downright gripping: journalist Nathaniel Idle, reading Mystic River in an internet cafe, is handed a note by a mysterious blonde. He follows her outside, loses her, and only then unfolds the paper. It's a warning to leave the cafe. Behind him, the building explodes. The explosion of course triggers a police investigation, and Nat's departure from the building immediately before it blew up makes him an obvious suspect. But that's just the beginning of Nat's problems. He's driven to investigate the explosion himself to find out why he was spared, and to find the person who spared him: he recognized the writing on the note, but the writer can't be who he thinks it is. Nat's investigation leads him to re-examine an old relationship--a year-long affair that ended with his girlfriend's death. In the process, he finds that his connection to the cafe explosion is far deeper and more complex than he could have supposed.

Richtel's debut novel is cutting edge in that he's exploring the darker side of the digital revolution--modern concerns about internet addiction and invasive advertising and the melding of virtual and "meat space" realities are here blown up into a paranoid fantasy. (It's topical, yes, but some of the same issues were explored at least as early as the 1970's, in a memorable Columbo episode. The topic has just been updated to the digital age.)

The book's mystery is compelling, but when Nat begins unravelling the truth things get confusing and hard to follow. Indeed, the more I think about the book's plot, the more questions about its credibility come to mind, starting with the logistics of that initial explosion and the warning passed to Nat. (Nat's presence at the cafe cannot have been predicted. And the trigger mechanism of the bomb was far from reliable. So when exactly was that note prepared?) I'm left unable to explain as completely as I'd like what led up to the cafe explosion, and why it had to happen. But the fault may be mine. Give the book a read and see for yourself.

-- Debra Hamel

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Great love story/thriller

Hooked is a terrific, tight, intelligent read. Nice guy med school drop-out turned San Francisco journalist Nat Idle only just survives a coffee shop bomb after he gets a note from a passing hottie telling him to leave immediately. Weird thing is the note's in his dead girlfriend's handwriting. He sets out to figure out what's going on and we get flashbacks of his very sweet, hot relationship with the dead girlfriend and in that way understand why he's pining. The writing's stylish and spare, the back-and-forth between flashback love and Nat's current danger works great (and of course there are clues in all the love scenes, so the whole thing hangs together), the diabolical scheme Nat uncovers is plausible enough to be both chilling and intelligent enough to be thought-provoking. Richtel is better at writing the guy-in-love stuff than he is at the race-to-save-your-life stuff, but the guy-in-love stuff is so good you don't mind a couple of awkward action scenes nearer to the end. Anyway, the plot takes control of you by then so you pretty much can't put it down. I'll definitely look for more from this author. There's something deft about his quick-sketch writing style, and he never relaxes into trite descriptions.

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Great Pacing

I really enjoyed this book and found it to be a real page turner. I started it on a business trip and had to finish it before I could go to sleep that night. The main character Nat is well developed. Other characters could have used a little more depth, but it's a great debut novel. The topic of the development of software that can control our human decision making is facinating to me, and well within the realm of what our lives may become. Looking forward to the next book from this new author.

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