Plagiarized

Louie Huey and Chloe Robertson Mysteries #1

by Kim A. Smith, Patrick Crowley (Illustrations)

Plagiarized is a story of how computer technology affects one man’s life in 2025. The Des Moines Register reporter Louis Huey arrives at work one morning to find that a major voter fraud story that he had been investigating for weeks had been stolen and published in a sleazy tabloid owned by billionaire media mogul Randolph Knoblock. The most obvious explanation is that his computer had been hacked. But he had not yet written the story. In search of an answer, Huey and his Iowa State University intern, Chloe Robertson, discover that their lives have been transformed without their awareness, so dramatically that they question what it means to be human..This book is a work of fiction. But the technologies in this novel exist today and are being developed in government, university, and private laboratories around the world, often in secrecy. Louis Huey and Chloe Robertson happen to be newspaper reporters, but these technologies will change everyone’s life, regardless of who we are in life. Could the events in this novel happen? No doubt in my mind. Have some of these events already happened? Yes. Do we know enough to respond to the many challenges we are soon to face? Absolutely not. As Don Quixote once advised us, “Forewarned, forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory.”

244 pages, Paperback

First published February 4, 2013

About the author

Kim Smith was born in London, England but raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin by an American father and an English mother. Smith attended the University of Wisconsin, earning a doctorate in political communication. Smith has been a journalist, professor, essayist, and novelist.

Reviews

[Bryan Cacciatore · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just want to start off this review by saying this version of Plagiarized needs an edit job. There are a lot of spelling and grammatical mistakes throughout the book that really take away from the experience of an otherwise very good read. My rating would/will be higher when this book goes through a little more of an editing process.

One thing that you will notice about the book is a very large number of embedded hyperlinks. At first I found it a very interesting way to read up on the information that went into the book, and it wasn't lost on me that the author was crediting his sources the way a journalist would to avoid accidental plagiarism. Eventually they became a little cumbersome for me; this a more personal issue depending on if you are using a touchscreen reader or not, it was easy to click a hyperlink without realizing it on the Kindle Paperwhite which went directly to the web browser and away from what I was reading. While it was a little jarring, I thought it a very unique and interesting addition to the book. While not edited well, fact checking was definitely covered.

Now onto the story itself...loved it. It was very thoughtfully written and quite an enjoyable read. The characters were very believable and the plot kept me turning the pages. Almost in the style of a whodunit, there are a lot of unanswered questions that slowly get revealed as the plot thickens and more questions exposed. Some of the technology in the book is a little far-fetched for now (even with the hyperlinks to where the information came from), but it is very plausible in the coming years. Even though the technology the powerful and the government seemed a little out there (more in the realm of the paranoid), the tech that the individuals had is a good projection of where things will be in 10-15 years from now (which is where the book takes place, 2025). The flow of the story is really nice without many slowdowns. While there is no real action, it really dives deep into the world of investigative journalism.

Even through all the annoyances, I really enjoyed the calming read of Plagiarized. This book weighs heavily on future technologies and the paranoia that can come from it. Just as 15 years ago they would be paranoid of what we can accomplish today, 15 years from now it will be the same. This one is worth a read (although if you get really held up on editing you might want to wait for another version).

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subject matter and core of the story was great stuff for me. Unfortunately, the dialogue and dumbing down of the technology and concepts really pained me to read. It seems to me that those who would be drawn to the book would have at least a general idea of how things worked, but maybe I'm biased since I was already knowledgeable about the topics. The dialogue was pretty rough cut to me. It made me uncomfortable quite often as it was almost never natural sounding. I'm glad I read the book, but it doesn't get my praise.

[Mary Taitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable and thought provoking. Louis Huey has a story stolen and published by a tabloid. It was a story he was about to write and had few people about it. When he investigates this plagiarism, what he learns boggles his mind and causes him to be suspended from his job. What next?