By John L. Betcher
Buy new: $14.35
Customer Rating:
First tagged by John L. Betcher
Related tags: mystery, mystery novel, twin cities, red wing, espionage, minneapolis, fiction
Review & Description
After decades of clandestine government operations, James "Beck" Becker and his wife Elizabeth return to Beck's childhood home town to enjoy a settled retirement in the small Mississippi river community of Red Wing, Minnesota. But "settled"is a relative term and no matter where Beck goes, intrigue follows. When Minneapolis computer genius, Katherine Whitson, disappears under peculiar circumstances, her husband exploits a sympathetic Red Wing acquaintance to enlist Beck's aid in finding her. As Beck searches for Katherine, the tangled trail leads from her luxury Minneapolis warehouse district condo, through her husband's in-the-closet personal escapades, past the entrenched hierarchy of elite computer professionals, and into the mind-bending world inside computer microprocessors. Katherine's kidnapping is clearly more complicated than a typical abduction. As it turns out, the Beckers must use all of their considerable experience -- his as a military intelligence operative; hers as a CIA code-cracker -- to save Katherine and bring her abductors to justice. Read more
Reviewed by Charles Ashbacher, Amazon.com TOP 50 REVIEWER , April 15, 2010.
ReplyDeleteRating: FIVE STARS ★★★★★
This review is of: The Missing Element, a James Becker Mystery (Paperback).
As a longtime teacher of computer science and a self-admitted computer geek that sometimes works in security, I recognize the plausibility of the fundamental premise of this story. Computer chips are manufactured in foreign countries and it is very possible that pathways are included that would allow malicious programs to run.
James "Beck" Becker has retired from his former role as a clandestine operative for the federal government and is now working as a lawyer in Red Wing, Minnesota. However, when computer geek Katherine Whitson disappears, her husband contacts a classmate whose husband is a local Deputy Sheriff. That deputy knows Beck and enlists his aid in an attempt to learn what happened to Katherine.
The first impression is that she simply got tired of her husband and left, the man is obsessive-compulsive about everything and incredibly annoying. However, being a trained investigator, Beck sees things that are incongruous and has an immediate suspicion of fowl play. Enlisting the aid of his aptly named Native American friend Bull and his uber-computer geek wife, Beck stays on the trail that grows convoluted with a few distracters.
Unlike other thrillers based on an extremely implausible foundation scenario, this one uses a very real, even likely situation. The wisecracking dialog between Beck and his wife and the inclusion of the mysterious but very capable sidekick Bull reminded me of the "Spenser" series by Robert Parker. Which is high praise as there are none better in that genre. There is no real gunplay or significant fisticuffs in this book, the action is more cerebral, which I found refreshing for a mystery based on what is essentially a private detective.