Hooked - Matt Richtel

Hooked starts with an explosion and an intriguing premise – a San Francisco journalist Nat Idle is sitting in a coffee bar when a mysterious woman leaves him a note telling him to get out of the building fast. Believing she looks like his former girlfriend Annie, who died in a boating accident, he follows her out of the café just as a bomb goes off inside. The novel however goes straight downhill after chapter one with further unlikely and ultimately irrelevant coincidences (the investigating police officer is the brother of a corrupt cop that Nat, a medical journalist, has exposed in one of his articles), poor characterisation and unconvincing depiction of the central relationships between the characters.

It’s the credibility in the actual premise however that is the biggest problem with Hooked. I mean, without revealing the plot, towards the end of the novel even the villains laugh at Nat when he threatens to expose their activities. Who’s going to believe a story like that?, they tell him. Who indeed? There may indeed be corruption in Silicon Valley, but I doubt the senior executives and businessmen are as naïve as the ones here seem to be. Even allowing for suspension of disbelief however, and seeing the theme as being a commentary on the addictive nature of home computing and our growing reliance on it, the lack of any particularly likeable characters makes Hooked difficult to get addicted to.