Amazon Best Books of the Month, September 2011: Neal Stephenson is quite
rightly known as a writer of ideas, but don't put it past him to pen
a straightforward thriller. True, the plot of said thriller hinges on a
massively multiplayer online game that's a step beyond what's actually
available on the Internet circa 2011, but that's as far as the sci-fi goes.
Enter "REAMDE," an online virus that brings together a super-rich CEO,
a Chinese hacker, a rogue Russian mafioso, an assimilated East African
beauty, an itinerant Hungarian software programmer, two insanely prolific
fantasy writers, and guns, guns, guns. (The book features so much firepower
that Stephenson enlisted what he calls a "ballistics copy editor.") It takes
a veritable master of pacing to make a thousand pages feel like barely
a third of that, but Stephenson is that master; his breakneck narrative
starts fast and never, ever lets up. As such, Reamde is as likely to turn
off fans of his more cerebral fiction as it is to gain him scads of new
devotees. Regardless, it marks an inimitable highlight of this year's
thriller roster. --Jason Kirk

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