New Release: Hacked (Tucker Mystery #4) by Ray Daniel

Hacked (Tucker Mystery #4)
by Ray Daniel

Publication Date: June 8, 2017
Publisher: Midnight Ink

Description:
An online controversy threatens to take Tucker offline for good. #TuckerGate

Aloysius Tucker vows vengeance when a hacker terrorizes his ten-year-old cousin, Maria. Promising Maria that he’ll unmask the hacker and get an apology, Tucker goes online to get justice. But the resulting flame war turns deadly when the hacker is murdered. Now more hackers, the whole Twitterverse, and a relentless bounty hunter agree on one thing: Tucker is the killer and must be stopped.

His inbox filled with death threats, Tucker battles Anonymous, Chinese spies, and his own self-destructive rage while chasing a murderer the online community has named the HackMaster. Can Tucker build a case against the killer and clear his name before the death threats come true?

My Review:
Hacked is packed with thrills, and even though it’s part of a series, it reads great as a standalone. This is a book of righteous online indignation leading to lethal offline consequences. The author does a great job of making an exciting and dangerous situation plausible.

Most of the characters are well-developed and interesting. Maria, the victim of the online bully, has her own secrets. Tucker’s a master hacker, but he’s just as susceptible to the pull of internet drama as everyone else. The bullies that go after Maria are punks online, but real people with families and lives offline. And, well, CapnMerica doesn’t quite fit the well-developed criteria, but he was incredibly interesting.

Even the villain, the HackMaster, is more than anyone could guess. I found the outcome surprising, but logical. I had an inkling of suspicion about midway through, but there were several candidates for that suspicion. I didn’t ultimately figure it out until just about the same time as Tucker did.

Overall, I loved this story. While it’s pegged as a mystery, it has its fair share of thrills, too. I’d recommend this to folks who love mysteries and thrillers, particularly if they dig stories about hackers.

I picked up the advance review copy of this book from NetGalley.

About the Author:
Ray Daniel is the award-winning author of Boston-based crime fiction. His short stories “Give Me a Dollar” won a 2014 Derringer Award for short fiction and “Driving Miss Rachel” was chosen as a 2013 distinguished short story by Otto Penzler, editor of The Best American Mystery Stories 2013.

Daniel’s work has been published in the Level Best Books anthologies Thin Ice, Blood Moon, and Stone Cold. Terminated is his first novel.

For more information, visit him online at raydanielmystery.com and follow him on twitter @raydanielmystry.    

More Links:
Amazon Profile          
Goodreads Profile

Books by this Author:

 

Tucker Mysteries in order of publication.

Non-Book Review: Tweetdeck is Awesome!

Tweeting in TweetDeck

I like Twitter, but Tweetdeck is awesome.

I don't recall exactly how I found out about it, probably from another blog or a tweet. Basically it's Twitter, but on your terms. You customize how you want to interact with your account. I have all the posts responding to or liking my tweets, my messages, and my scheduled posts all on their own columns. The constant twitter feed, which I find overwhelming on the main site, is hidden off to the side.

And yes, the scheduled posts. When I first got on Twitter, I was all like, "I write and post all my Tweets real-time." That's fine and all, but when you're trying to manage a blog and share reviews and also post thoughtful and interesting Tweets consistently, it gets rather difficult. So yes, with Tweetdeck, I went to the dark side, as I thought of it at the time, and started scheduling things ahead of time, mostly links to my books and quotes from them.

Then about this time last year I got frisky and wrote out a slew of posts of all sorts. Not just for my books, but for some of my older non-review posts here on the blog, for things I've learned as an author, and for my take on healthy living and happiness. I wrote them all over the course of a week and then spent a weekend scheduling them to go out over the course of the rest of the year.

This experiment in scheduled Tweets actually ran out just last month. So now that it's over, was it worth it?

Yes, it was. Not only did I manage to be more present in Twitter, I got more engagement out of folks and more followers, because I wasn't just posting random stuff, I was posting regularly and according to a few pre-determined themes I thought folks would enjoy.

An unexpected bonus was the enjoyment I got out of seeing those posts come up and remembering when I wrote them. It was fun!

So, long story short. I found Tweetdeck. It's neat. I definitely recommend it to folks who like Twitter.

Go forth and Tweet!