Hardcover, 336 pages
English language
Published Feb. 26, 2011 by Thomas Dunne Books.
Over the Atlantic, an airliner's controls suddenly stop reacting. In Japan, an oil tanker runs aground when its navigational system fails. In the Midwest, a nuclear power plant nearly becomes the next Chernobyl. At first, these computer failures seem unrelated. But Jeff Aiken, a former government analyst who saw the mistakes made before 9/11, fears that there may be a more serious attack coming. And he soon realizes that there isn't much time if he hopes to stop an international disaster. Zero Day presents a chilling "what if" scenario written in the vein of Richard A. Clarke and Daniel Suarez.
Not for the quality of the writing (although it noticeably improves towards the middle of the book), but this book is well worth the read for the message it is getting across.
Formulaic thriller that highlights the fragility of our computer-and-network dependent world. Computer people will probably enjoy it more than non-computer people, but Russinovich makes the prose and descriptions accessible to most. As a leading computer professional, Russinovich gets his computer facts right (though he does throw in an FTP transfer that makes us cringe at the plaintext password implications). The story has a few twists and plenty of chills. Fans of the genre will enjoy it, as I did. And we'll all worry a little more about computer security and keeping AV and other patches up to date.
I really wanted to like this book. I really did. Of all people, Mark Russinovich should have been able to tap into his experience with computer security to write something really amazing. Instead he wrote something that was simply too full of clichés. He even went so far as to associate the events of 9/11 to the protagonist's past to gain sympathy from the reader instead of writing something that makes the reader care.
Zero Day was poorly written and the plot was poorly developed.
