Digital Fortress - Dan Brown

Digital Fortress is a good book. Though, not as good The Da Vinci Code nor Angels and Demons. The story revolves around the NSA( National Security Agency). The finest decrypting machine in the NSA has not yet decoded a certain message. The NSA fears that this could be their worst nightmare; a message employing the rotating clear text algorithm. Susan Fletcher works in the NSA and is suddenly summoned to work on the problem. Commander Strathmore heads the department in which Susan works. A Japanese guy, named Ensei Tankado claims to have implemented the algorithm; and the message. He threatens to make the code public by selling it to the highest bidder. David Becker, a ...  Read the complete review

Despite hints from some people to the contrary, I am not a terrible book snob. I read crime, fantasy, s-f, thrillers and chick-lit quite frequently and historical romances from time to time. But even a `genre` book needs to have a modicum of quality. Sadly, `Digital Fortress` does not. It`s a debut novel of Dan Brown that has been re-issued due to the phenomenal popularity of the `Da Vinci Code` and it is a blatant, mercenary and seemingly successful (if judged by the number of reviews) attempt to discount that popularity and generate some more revenue from a an earlier effort. `Digital Fortress` is a thriller and thus I better start with ...  Read the complete review

I can still remember a good few years ago now, when nobody had ever heard of author, Dan Brown. He was just another hack thriller writer who had gone under the radar without making any kind of a splash. Then came The Da Vinci Code with all the scandal and controversy that came with it (and how much of that was a Dan Brown marketing and P.R exercise, one wonders) and suddenly Brown became an overnight success and a household name. It is fortunate too, that this rise to fame coincided with a sudden public reinterest with reading, following the meteoric success of the Harry Potter novels, which saw sales of Brown's Da Vinci Code soar beyond most people's belief. ...  Read the complete review

Beginning like a badly clichéd romance novel the story introduces two characters, Susan [Fletcher] and David [Becker] as they are about to be unexpectedly parted. The story delves into their past and how the met, Susan's history as a Cryptographer and realises the book to be that of codes and mathematics. Susan works for the NSA which is almost unheard of in the world but the strongest decoding facility breaking into worldwide e-mails and catching people like terrorists as they send encoded messages which are then decoded by NSA and they save the day. But something goes wrong when a code that is unbreakable enters circulation essentially meaning criminals could get away ...  Read the complete review

Dan Brown - Digital Fortress This book is fast paced and will just keep you turining those pages! It is no where near the standard of most of his other books, but is still a good read and if you are a Dan Brown fan you will definitly enjoy it. Susan Fletcher a brilliant cryptographer working in the governments most secrective agency, simply named the National Security Agency (NSA), is called in late to work on a saturday, to assist the director of the Crypto with a problem that only he trusts her with. The TRANSLTR, a brilliant code breaking machine, as Susan discovers, is stuck in a loop created by Ensei Tankando (a former NSA employee); ...  Read the complete review