Hooked: A Thriller About Love and Other Addictions
March 23, 2010 by VC-List.com
Product Description
Nat Idle, a San Francisco writer with a medical degree, narrowly survives an explosion in an Internet café after a stranger hands him a note warning him to exit immediately.
The handwriting on the note belongs to his deceased girlfriend, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist whom he has obsessively been mourning. So begins HOOKED, a pop thriller for the Internet Age, written with the force of an adrenaline rush and the pace of an intimate email dispatch you can’t stop reading. Each chapter of this novel will keep readers hooked as Nat Idle searches for the love of his life in the midst of manipulation and conspiracy.
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First Sentence: I’m guessing that the moment that you life begins to unravel is often unceremonious–heralded by a whimper.
Medical journalist Nat Idle is a sitting in a San Francisco café having a cup of coffee when his dead girlfriend hand him a note telling him to get out of the café, NOW. When he goes after her, the café explodes. Nat’s search takes him into Silicon Valley and venture capitalism.
After an exciting first chapter, the book wanders aimlessly between the present to the past. There is some humorous dialogue but next to no character development. Sense of place is more encyclopedic than evocative. Maybe because I’ve both worked in high-tech and lived in the Bay Area (above Silicon Area) for years, I expected more from this book. The plot is over-the-top implausible with very little actual suspense. Nora Roberts, in her J.D. Robb series, had a plot similar to this and I actually liked that book much better. I read this in one day, but found myself becoming increasingly bored with it and just wanted it to end. I was definitely not hooked on this book.
Rating: 1 / 5
The premise is interesting but the story is difficult to follow and unfolds in random and uninteresting ways. I was going to give it one star but the ending made it clear what the author was trying to do.
I think the idea is good; my hope is that a good screenwriter will turn it into a good movie.
Rating: 2 / 5
Extremely funny and entertaining. Essential reading for anyone skeptical about the messianic claims now coming out of Silicon Valley. Would love a cartoon version too and a movie.
Rating: 5 / 5
I was so into this book when I first started reading it but after a few chapters it just got boring and just went over my head. I found it hard to understand what was going on half the time and it just went from present to past so fast that sometimes I didnt even notice. I just found this book a complete bore and just not worth my time when there are so many good books that keep me glued to the pages.
Rating: 1 / 5
Matt Richtel lives in San Francisco, from where he has covered high-tech news and issues for the New York Times for several years while also writing a successful comic strip, Rudy Park, which is set in an internet cafe. Hooked, Richtel’s first novel, is a thriller set in a version of that high-tech world where everything is not necessarily what it appears to be.
Despite four years of medical school, Nat Idle has chosen to eke out a living as a freelance medical journalist, a decision that his friends and family find hard to understand. But making a living is not what is most on Nat’s mind since the sudden death of the girl with whom he was desperately and completely in love. These days he is struggling to accept the idea that he will never see Annie again and to move on with the rest of his life. Little did he know that the rest of his life was about to change in a way that he never expected.
Seated in a San Francisco internet cafe, and engrossed in the book he was reading, Nat barely noticed the woman before she placed a folded note on his table and hurried away. He decided that she might be flirting with him and followed her out the door to see what would happen next. It was only when he realized that he would not be able to catch up with her before she left in her car that Nat opened the note and read: “Get out of the cafe – NOW!” A split second later the cafe exploded and he was thrown through the air.
When his head finally cleared and he was sure that he was still in one piece Nat realized that he recognized the handwriting on the note to be that of his long-dead girlfriend, Annie. Thus begins Nat’s quest to solve the mystery of the note and how the cafe explosion could possibly have anything to do with Annie’s tragic death. Along the way, Nat has to deal with being a suspect in the explosion and with the realization that everything that he has assumed about his relationship with the love of his life might have been nothing but a distorted illusion on his part. He meets good cops and bad cops – but can he tell which is which. He needs help if he is going to survive life on the run while still trying to solve the mystery of that note, but whom can he trust?
Hooked has a lot going for it. It’s written in a style that allows for it to be read at the quick pace that works best for thrillers and its opening chapters do, indeed, hook the reader by introducing the question of whether or not Nat’s girlfriend might still be alive. But about two-thirds of the way through the book, when some of the answers started to come, the plot took a twist that was less compelling and which completely changed the nature of the book into one that began to bore me. I looked forward to the end of the book for all the wrong reasons. But as he shows in the first part of Hooked, Matt Richtel is a talented writer and I’m curious to see what is next for him.
Rating: 3 / 5