Book Review: Unallocated Space

Resident book reviewer Carol Hall reviews the chilling thriller by Jerry Hatchett.

This is a thriller with a different slant, as the central character, Sam Flatt, is a digital forensic expert – with a history.  The beginning of the book gives a flavour of that history as a black ops assignment plays out.  So I need to say right at the start that if you don’t like your reading to contain graphic descriptions of torture and murder, then this book is not for you!  I wouldn’t usually go for it either, but once I’d started it I wanted to see how it all panned out.

So Sam takes a job in Las Vegas at a very futuristic casino where they are losing money.  The sophisticated computer systems, running the gambling machines, are not operating in the owner’s favour and their tech guys can’t find how it’s being done.  What Sam finds is far more than clever computer hacking so his historical background is unexpectedly useful.

The computer crime is clever and far reaching, involving an international set of despicable people.  It also involves some very vulnerable people, desperate to get out of their circumstances, only to find they are in far worse ones.  Towards the end of the book the crimes becomes personal and Sam has to work fast to bring about the conclusion he needs.  It almost doesn’t come off because human beings are not as predictable as authors would sometimes have us believe, something I liked that about Jerry Hatchett’s writing.