Let’s get the crankiness over first. Have you noticed the trend towards eliminating irregular verbs? “Dived” instead of “dove”, “lighted” instead of “lit”, “shined” instead of “shone” and more? I like irregular verbs. They link our English back to its Anglo Saxon roots and it annoys me when authors don’t use them.
I’m also annoyed when authors uses the name of the Lord as a throwaway exclamation or curse. This is wrong.
On to the book review…
Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1)
Surveillance is a near future suspense novel set in a world where everything is recorded and tracked. Walk into a building? It’s on the video record. Speak in a public place? Recorded, voice print identified to you and logged. The basic system, called Hathor, handles everything and connects seamlessly to services like Hearth (housing) and Midas (finance).
The novel occurs about 20 years after the first systems were challenged on privacy grounds and after the benefits and relatively benign uses have made almost everyone accept them. For example Katie was able to find, lease and decorate an apartment while walking out of work using the Hearth system. Most criminal trials now happen before a judge who uses the evidence collected by Jurisprudence and assembled by law enforcement into a coherent story virtually guaranteed to be accurate.
Katie Pratt is brand new to the FBI Ghost Targets group, assigned to a murder investigation on her first day. The Ghost Targets group exists because some people have been able to ghost themselves right out of the records. Since Jurisprudence cannot see the ghosts, the FBI team develops other methods.
Surveillance is interesting and somewhat thought provoking. Would people really give up their privacy in exchange for great convenience and benign, almost invisible oversight? And of course we have the perennial question. If the watchers watch everything, who watches the watchers?
I enjoyed the idea and the plot but found the characters were a bit flat. We never learn the connection between the murderer and his victim, why they were together. Katie doesn’t show much personality and Martin Door, one of the original Hathor developers, is two-dimensional.
Overall this was an OK book, worth reading but not worth keeping. I don’t plan to look for the sequels.
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