Skip to main content

Member Reviews

Kill process by William Hertling.
Kill chain book 1.
By day, Angie, a twenty-year veteran of the tech industry, is a data analyst at Tomo, the world's largest social networking company; by night, she exploits her database access to profile domestic abusers and kill the worst of them. She can't change her own traumatic past, but she can save other women.
This was a good read. Slow but readable. Likeable characters. 4*.

Was this review helpful?

During one of my first jobs, some 40 years ago, I worked in a ‘computer department’, where the computer was a very big machine, tended to by serious looking guys in white coats. I was only allowed to handle the kilometers of printed paper the thing spewed out every morning.
Skip to 1982 and hey, enter the word processor – some sort of a computer anyway. I was immediately hooked and wanted nothing more than to work with the machine. Two years later, and personal computers were introduced at my workplace. And ten years later, the Internet was available for everybody who could afford a computer.
It’s 36 years later now and sometimes young people don’t even understand what I’m saying when telling about those machines. What was once science fiction, is now history.
I read SF books in which is predicted that one day we all will be connected, and not only connected but also dependent on a global network. And yes, some of those stories warn us against what is happening for some time now, with companies like Google and platforms like Facebook.
And although the Internet certainly has its blessings (Goodreads, for instance ;-) ) it is not always safe and sometimes plain dangerous.
Kill Process tells us all. Angie uses her knowledge in a good way and a bad way. She wants to help abused woman but finding all about the abusive husbands and then killing them is not exactly the right way to do so. But she, herself a victim, sees different. But when she finds out, finally I might say, that with Tomo the customer is not the customer but the product, she rethinks her life and sets out to do something really good. This thriller is very well written, with an interesting plot and most of all extensive knowledge of all matters IT and the capability to explain this to readers who might not remember how exciting it felt to discover you could connect to people all over the world with just a few keystrokes. For people who have no idea about how a computer actually works behind all the colorful buttons. And maybe also for people who still think that you have some privacy left.
What I absolutely loved was Angie ‘grokking’ sometimes… but that is another story.

Was this review helpful?

I thought the book started off great, how she killed and why. Then it went into the coder/hacker/programmer speak and all the technical angles and talk, all set. Lost me there. I read the whole book but still, was disappointed. I thought it was going to be better. Sorry.

Was this review helpful?