f2f - Phillip Finch

[goodreads]

Title: f2f Author: Phillip Finch Genre: Suspense Rating: 7/10 # pages: 246 Date read: March, 2008

Summary: Your life is in jeopardy. As you read this, you are within reach of a murderer.

So begins a macabre message posted on Verba -- an electronic bulletin board, a virtual meeting place where anyone with a computer and a modem can exchange views, flirt, or argue with complete anonymity. But an ingenious serial killer under the innocent-sounding name of Snowflake is using the vast potential of the Net to choose victims for a deadly f2f -- a face-to-face meeting.

Filmmaker Kate Lavin is one of the Verba subscribers who have attracted Snowflake's attention. But her concerns are pushed aside by work and her worries about her ex-husband, computer genius Ellis Holle. Then the first body appears, with a cryptic message to taunt investigators. Shortly after, another Verba subscriber dies.

The police have no clues -- and don't even yet know what connects the victims. It will take a mind as brilliant as the killer's, with as bold a disregard for convention and the law, to crack the warped code of a murderer's logic...before the rest of the names on the list -- including Kate's -- become names on homicide case files.

Review: I've read this several times when I was younger, and honestly remembered it as being better than it was. Whether that's because I'm misremembering, or because my standards were lower back then, I don't know, but it was interesting to see.

It's obvious that it's very dated though. All the explanations of computers, internet and online forums are almost naive, and I'd think just about everybody would know enough not to run an exe-file received from somebody they don't know. That's just asking to get infected!

Other than that, it's still a fascinating book and a sobering thought that we're not nearly as anonymous online as we'd like to think.

Book List