With Zombies by Michael F Stewart

With Zombies by Michael F Stewart is the final volume in the Assured Destruction trilogy. If you haven't read the earlier books or my reviews of the earlier books, Assured Destruction and Script Kiddie, probably best to skip this. Unless you want to be spoiled, in which case, please do. Also, I have a new spoiler function, which I'll be using for the first time. So if you do want to be spoiled for With Zombies, hover your mouse over the dark grey boxes below (or highlight, if you want to be low-tech). The spoiler won't be hidden if you're reading this in an email or an RSS feeder (or Tumblr dashboard), so you might want to consider clicking through, unless you don't care about spoilers.

The final book in the Assured Destruction series!

Jan Rose may already be expunged from the police department's High Tech Crime Unit. Her mother's hospitalized, and Assured Destruction's on the cusp of bankruptcy. But Jan doesn't wait on anything, she seeks out the customers who used to keep the family business afloat. That's when everything starts to go wrong.

A computer virus--aka the Zombie Worm--threatens not only her school and Shadownet, but the entire city. A skull with a chain running through its socket links a powerful gang to her former customers, and holds the secrets to why her father left and the identity of her mother's boyfriend.

To save her family and the business, Jan must determine who is friend and who is foe. And decide what type of hacker she wishes to become: Gray, white, or black. Not only her life hangs in the balance.

Oh my goodness, this book was awesome. I mean, I enjoyed the first two books but in this final volume everything really comes together. The previous two books had fairly stand-alone stories which dealt with a few events that wrapped up by the end of the book. In contrast, With Zombies builds on all the storylines that have gone before, including a few things that weren't obviously part of any over-arching story. And that was great, it was nice to see everything come together. But it wasn't the real strength of this concluding volume, or at least, not the only strength. The title, by the way, can be taken to mean a few different things, the most obvious being the zombie worm (virus) that's plaguing Ottawa.

The easiest thing to discuss is how this concluding volume raised the stakes and had more excitement in it and so forth. In many ways, this is also the least interesting thing to discuss — although I did enjoy the twists and somewhat shocking turns the story took. The best bits were the continuation of how the author dealt with Jan's mum's MS and the sensibly realistic consequences Jan suffers after the events of the first two books.

In my review of Script Kiddie, I said that the most pressing reason for me to read the third book was to find out what happened to Jan's mum (Tina) after her health took a turn for the worse. Tina's health is, indeed, a very big, looming issue in With Zombies. It's written almost as a background issue — since Jan is the main character, not her mum — but Jan is only 16–17 (she has a birthday somewhere during the book) and still needs parental supervision to guide her. On the other hand, being a teenager, she does thing she can be fairly independent. And like a fairly normal teenager, she's reluctant to rely on her mum's new (ish) boyfriend.

Trying to look after herself, keep the family business afloat, not miss any more days of school (so that she doesn't have to repeat the semester), visit her mum in hospital, make friends with and learn from hackers, and deal with a virus that has infected everyone's computers... Jan bites off more than she can chew. The fact that she's still having PTSD flashbacks to the traumatic events of the first two books (being kidnapped, fighting off and nearly shooting a paedophile) is a nice, realistic touch but doesn't help her state of mind. I really really liked the realistic portrayal of consequences.

<spoiler, mainly concerning illnesses>

Combining all that with not enough sleep and yet another traumatic event, it's hardly surprising that Jan suffers from an episode acute stress disorder and ends up in the psych ward. Really, it's perfectly logical. And better yet, there's no stigma, in this book, attached to mental illness. Once her friends realise what happened etc, they're perfectly understanding and supportive of her. Jan's main reaction to being in the adolescent psych ward is wanting to see her mum and getting out to get on with fixing things. Her mum's time in hospital for catatonic depression is similarly treated. Everyone worries about whether she'll be OK without stigmatising the depression part. It was a really refreshing take.

Also, both before and after her mum's hospitalisation, it was clear that although the MS made it harder for Tina to do things (like walk), she was still capable and had raised a smart teenager with little help. And, without spoiling too much, being ill and in a wheelchair does not stop her from saving the day. I cheered.

<end spoiler>

The last main thing I want to talk about is Jan's character growth. In the first two books she makes a lot of suboptimal decisions (they weren't all that bad) and doesn't think everything through. Things work out, but only just. In the third book, she starts off doing the same — the third book picks up only an hour or so after the second book, so it would be strange if she didn't — but after things come to a head, she is forced to learn to accept help. And then, after realising that she really doesn't have to do everything alone, she even learns to plan more than two steps ahead. Yay, Jan.

I didn't realise until I got to the end and saw the acknowledgements, but apparently both book three and the omnibus edition (as a stretch goal) are the result of a Kickstarter campaign. Especially given the minor cliff-hanger at the end of book two, I was a bit surprised by this. Of course, I'm glad it was funded and glad I saw it on NetGalley and decided to read it. I've given each instalment a different number of stars but since I'm up to the last one, I feel like I can also give a rating to the omnibus as a whole. The whole series is greater than the average of its parts (see what I did there) and I'm giving the omnibus 4.5 / 5 stars.

I highly recommend this series to fans of geeky contemporary fiction, YA and cyberpunk — although there's nothing speculative or futuristic in it. I would also recommend it to anyone interested in reading good representations of disability, chronic illness and mental illness. I'm honestly having difficulty thinking of other books that treat mental illness without social stigma. I was pleasantly surprised by this series, and if I had any geeky teenagers in my life, I would be foisting it upon them all.

5 / 5 stars

First published: March 2014, Non Sequitur Press
Series: Assured Destruction, book 3 of 3
Format read: omnibus edition (review copy)
Source: publisher via NetGalley

Script Kiddie by Michael F Stewart

Script Kiddie by Michael F Stewart is the second book in the Assured Destruction trilogy. You can read my review of the first book here. This review contains spoilers for the first book, Assured Destruction, since the ending of that feeds into the set up of Script Kiddie.

Jan Rose no longer steals data from the old computers she recycles. She doesn't need to. As the newest member of the police department’s High Tech Crime Unit, the laptop of a murderer has landed on her desk. Her job: to profile and expose a killer.

But that’s not all.

A creep lurks in the shadows, stalking a friend, and Jan must stop him before the hunt turns deadly. The clock counts down for Jan to save her friend, her job, her boyfriend--maybe even her life.

Where the first book was about Jan doing some questionable things and then being "punished" for it by the bad guy, Script Kiddie is about Jan trying to hold everything together while trying to prevent bad stuff from happening. After the events in Assured Destruction, Jan finds herself sentenced to 2000 hours of community service. Luckily for her, the cop that showed up a bit in the first book, recognises her hacking skills and recruits her as an assistant (sort of) in the cyber crimes division.

Script Kiddie definitely carries the same tone as Assured Destruction, but the angle of the plot is less someone semi-randomly attacking Jan and more Jan trying to help and fix things. I think I enjoyed it more for this reason. Like in the first book, she does make some poor decisions, but most of those were related to not being experienced with what the police wanted her to do. Aside from a few naive and, well, a little eccentric choices, I didn't feel she made quite as many poor decisions. Which, yay, character development. (But she does do some silly things still, don't get me wrong.)

The title comes from her making some forays into the hacking community — a script kiddie is a very low-level hacker that more experienced hackers mock. Tied with the hacking is Jan's changing relationship with Peter, her mum's boyfriend. In the first book he was newer and more distant from the plot (mainly just existing for her to be annoyed that her mum has such an old boyfriend) but he has become more central. I have to admit I'm a little suspicious of his role and I'm wondering what will happen with him in the final book. I hope he really does turn out to be nice, but it's hard to predict at this point.

Although this is a second book in a trilogy and the events do follow on directly from the first book, the plot is pretty stand-alone. I mean, it's still better to read the first book first because of character introductions and back-story, but the plot that arises in Script Kiddie is almost all tied up by the end. The only thing that isn't tied up is Jan's mum's illness — MS — which takes a turn for the worse in this book. That's the only cliffhanger at the end. I was going to read the third book anyway, but now I need to, to find out what happens with her mum. I hope it won't be too sad.

Script Kiddie was a fun read and I'll definitely be reading the last book in the series straight away. I recommend the series to anyone looking for a fast-paced, geeky, contemporary YA series. Each book is pretty short (in fact, my omnibus edition is only a few iPad pages longer than the last BFF I read) and not a huge time commitment.

4 / 5 stars

First published: 2013, Non Sequitur Press
Series: Yes. Assured Destruction, book 2 of 3
Format read: eARC of the Complete Series edition (see second cover art above)
Source: Publisher via NetGalley

Assured Destruction by Michael F Stewart

Assured Destruction by Michael F Stewart is the first book I've read by the author. It's not technically science fiction, because it's set in the present and contains only existent technology, but it is heavy on the tech and the coding and hacking, so I feel it fits into the same niche. My review copy is of the complete series (trilogy) — the series also being called Assured Destruction — but this review is of the first book only.

You can learn a lot about someone looking through their hard drive...

Sixteen-year-old Jan Rose knows that nothing is ever truly deleted. At least, not from the hard drives she scours to create the online identities she calls the Shadownet.

Hobby? Art form? Sad, pathetic plea to garner friendship, even virtually? Sure, Jan is guilty on all counts. Maybe she’s even addicted to it. It’s an exploration. Everyone has something to hide. The Shadownet’s hard drives are Jan’s secrets. They're stolen from her family’s computer recycling business Assured Destruction. If the police found out, Jan’s family would lose its livelihood.

When the real people behind Shadownet’s hard drives endure vicious cyber attacks, Jan realizes she is responsible. She doesn’t know who is targeting these people or why but as her life collapses Jan must use all her tech savvy to bring the perpetrators to justice before she becomes the next victim.

I was hooked into this book more quickly than I expected to be. The pacing is good and it's not very long, making in a quick read in both senses of the word. Janus wasn't the most likeable character ever, but I didn't hate her either. (Except for her name. And when it's shortened to Jan, my brain automatically jumps to pronouncing it "Yan" — thanks Sweden — which is a male name and bleh. But at least it's in first person, so this isn't a huge issue.)

Jan works for her mum's titular small business, recycling computers and destroying hard drives. Except, as the blurb says, instead of destroying them all, she keeps some and makes a network of Twitter and Facebook aliases out of them. On the one hand, the allure of looking through people's private files is understandable, but then turning them into internet personalities struck me as a little bit strange. I mean in the sense that I can understand why the other characters in the book thought she was weird.

Speaking of being weird, Jan is not a traditional loner hacker, despite her array of imaginary friends. She's actually in the cool group (or one of them?) at school and has friends (well, people she hangs out with that aren't outright frenemies) and boys interested in her. She's also smart but not super smart. What I mean by that is that often in these sorts of stories about smart teenagers, they are hyper-intelligent and think several steps ahead of everyone else. Jan... doesn't. She is smart, especially when it comes to computers, but she's not as careful/paranoid as she should be (or, more accurately, as I would be in the same situation) and she doesn't necessarily think everything through, to her detriment. I suppose this is a more realistic portrayal of "smart teenager" but I have gotten used to (and enjoy) the other kind. 

Another less common characterisation choice is that Jan's mother is in a wheelchair because she has MS. I really liked this portrayal because it's not just a background thing. Jan actively thinks about her mum's heath in several contexts; from feeling bad about not helping more at the shop, to hearing her coming because her wheelchair squeaks, to the lift they have to have in their abode, to fearing for her health and whether her mum is having a good day or a bad day. I don't think I've ever seen such a complete portrayal of a disability/chronic illness that wasn't the main character's (and even then...).
 
As I said, I enjoyed Assured Destruction more than I expected. It wasn't perfect, but it was fun. I'm planning to start the next book straight away. I would recommend it to fans of contemporary SF or code/computer-based stories. Like I said, it's not technically SF, but it is about a computer geek, and to me that seems to appeal to similar sensibilities. Oh, and fans of contemporary YA should also check it out.

3.5 / 5 stars

First published: 2013, Non Sequitur Press (omnibus edition, April 2014)
Series: Assured Destruction, book 1 of 3
Format read: eARC of omnibus edition
Source: publisher via NetGalley