Intruder

by Louis Charbonneau

An intruder's tampering with a computer system on which thousands of lives depend has left an entire city programmed for disaster, and the town's only defense is the computer itself

Genres: Thriller, Fiction

295 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

(A random Reader's Digest Condensed, Vol 4, 1979) From the 70s: perhaps this was cutting edge then but is outdated now. It does have a decent twist but the author tries to hard to write "cool" imo. Icky romance.

[Mark Holmes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in the fictional upstate New York city of Hollister (something like Syracuse, New York, maybe) in the mid-Seventies. Quite gripping, and thrilling, if you can get past the far-fetched premise (an entire city turned over to a computer system and its operators to run) and the tired Seventies conservative moralizing, which basically makes The Sixties the villain of the piece, not the title character, a malicious hacker with a grudge against the city. Trying not to give away too much, he's a Vietnam-era deserter from the Army whose wife died of childbirth complications in Hollister while they were on their way to Canada after he was refused service from a gas station owner who confiscated his credit card after finding it was on a pickup list, and it took a few minutes for somebody to call an ambulance. So now he has a burning, abiding hatred of the entire city of Hollister and he used his computer expertise to erase all the records of his life that he could get to, almost his entire identity. He and other unsympathetic characters, like the Southern California-based ex-girlfriend of the hero, ex-FBI agent Michael Egan; the abusive, philandering Vietnam MIA husband of the heroine Jennifer Tyson; and the barely-legal mistress of a married, philandering city councillor, are used as symbols of an amoral lack of connection to other people which seems to be what the Sixties were all about to this author. Charbonneau also has a carful of teenagers whose adventure cruising on hilly, icy streets turns tragic due to the Intruder's tampering with the timing of the traffic lights, and only one of them survives the resulting collision with an Animal Control truck; the teenagers are two-dimensional stereotypes all the way. But Charbonneau definitely knows how to put together an absorbing narrative, create suspense, a sense of place and time, and characters that the reader cares about, which is why I gave this book three stars.

[Diane Wachter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Intruder, Louis Charbonneau, RDC-M,#4-79, 1986. Crime by computer. 2☆'s = Okay.

[Jan Sørensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not know the writer at all, but was tempted by the words on the cover (in Danish: Haevn over Hollister"). And the book was very good indeed -and strangely modern in view of being published in 1979.
What could happen, when a city (it could also be a country) collect all their software systems in one single platform -as have happened in most countries -not at least in Denmark.
It becomes vulnerable, and in the city of Hollister a man with a grudge start to hack the system. Rathe scary -but fortunately some loveable persons gets to stop him in time. Really a page-turner.

[Marie · Rating 2 out of 5]

In one word: weird!

[Anita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author is actually Louis Charbonneau?

[Chanler Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

weak, flawed villain and a slow start. fun ending, got pretty tense. it's like if you had a book and it was mediocre. similar to that. two starts.

[Judy Crawford]

did not read