From the town that brought you Tipitina's...

As a huge fan of New Orlean's blues legend Professor Longhair, I am pleased to bring you the latest Hooked review from the New Orleans Times-Picayune. It called Hooked "Rocking good fun" and "terrific entertainment." (link and review excerpt below)
I realize this has absolutely nothing to do with Professor Longhair -- other than an oblique geographic connection -- but in the blog world, such tangents are unedited. What are you going to do?

From the Times Picayune:

http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/index.ssf?/base/living-0/1181712434149420.xml&coll=1

There's something different behind the jangling, "Vertigo"-like cover of 'Hooked,' (Twelve, $24.99), the debut novel by San Francisco-based New York Times writer Matt Richtel, who also draws the syndicated comic strip "Rudy Park."
Nat Idle is minding his own business, sitting in a cafe, when a woman leaves a note at his table: "Get out of the café -- NOW." He barely makes it to safety before the small place explodes behind him on what was looking like just another ordinary day in San Francisco. But what rocks Nat's world is that the note is written in his long-dead girlfriend's handwriting.
Nat is a science journalist, enough of a digger to know that nobody blows up a café without a reason, a suspicion that's confirmed when a blast victim's house catches fire during his memorial service. It all adds up to big trouble. Before long Nat, who teams up with a café waitress with dark secrets of her own, is hot on the trail of a conspiracy. He's a bit hampered in this because he can't trust the cops, having once sent one to jail as a result of an investigative series.
The plot hinges on high-tech secrets and the lengths corporations will go to keep them, especially one that involves using the digital environment to manipulate human behavior. And Nat's late girlfriend (or is she back?) was a venture capitalist who always had an eye on the Next Big Thing. The fast-paced plot has a serious underlay -- a sobering message about just how much we surrender of ourselves when we stare passively at a screen.
It's rocking good fun, although like many first novelists, Richtel wants to wrap up things too quickly at the end. But it's terrific entertainment, and Richtel's voice is strong and clear from the novel's opening: "I'm guessing that the moment that your life begins to unravel is often unceremonious -- heralded by a whimper. The bang should have told me something."
Nat Idle is another one of those good guys out there just trying to do the right thing, and in the process of telling his story, Richtel lets us know just how addicted we have become to technology -- at our peril.