In The Exphoria Code, elite MI6 hacker Brigitte Sharp foiled a terror attack on London that used stolen military drone software to deliver a ‘dirty bomb’.
Now Bridge must battle a series of hacks and ransomware attacks masterminded by someone known only as ‘Tempus’, who targets politicians and government officials with impunity.
When she discovers the campaign is linked to a cyber-attack on the London G20 summit, Bridge is drawn into the dark-web world of cryptocurrencies, Russian hackers and an African rebel militia.
In another compelling thriller from the creator of Atomic Blonde, MI6 races against time to prevent a disaster that could destroy the balance of global power forever.
Antony Johnston is a multi-award-winning author, a New York Times bestseller, and one of the most versatile writers of the modern era.
The Charlize Theron movie Atomic Blonde was based on his graphic novel. His murder mystery series The Dog Sitter Detective won the Barker Book Award. His crime puzzle novel Can You Solve the Murder? reinvented choose-your-own-story books for a mainstream audience and was a Waterstones Paperback of the Year. And his productivity guide The Organised Writer has helped authors all over the world take control of their workload.
Antony is a celebrated videogames writer, with genre-defining titles including Dead Space, Shadow of Mordor, and Resident Evil Village to his credit. His work on Silent Hill Ascension made him the only writer in the world to have contributed to all of gaming’s ‘big three’ horror franchises.
His immense body of work also includes Marvel superheroes such as Daredevil and Shang-Chi, the award-winning Alex Rider graphic novels, the post-apocalypse epic Wasteland, and more. He wrote and directed the film Crossover Point, made entirely in quarantine during the coronavirus pandemic.
An experienced podcaster and public speaker, he also frequently writes articles on the life of an author, and is a prolific musician.
Antony is a former vice chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, a member of International Thriller Writers and the Society of Authors, a Shore Scripts screenwriting judge, and sits on the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain’s videogames committee. He lives and works in England.
When a hacker targets politicians with a ransom-ware attack known as Tempus, MI6 officer Brigitte ‘Bridge’ Sharp is tasked with tracking down the source. While picking up a journalist in Paris, Bridge finds other agencies are hot on her tail and is forced into a crazy car chase across the city in a bid to escape. Back in London, and after a dressing-down by her boss for messing up, Brigitte struggles to track down a computer hacker who poses a new threat to political stability. Pulled into the world of crypto-currencies, Russian hackers and an African rebel militia, time is running out—can Bridge stop a potential global disaster?
This is the first of Antony Johnston’s Brigitte Sharp Thriller’s I’ve read, and it gets off to a great start. The world of crypto-currencies, Blockchain and ransomware is fairly new to me, but the author clearly knows what he’s talking about and the detail gives the plot a real sense of what goes on behind the doors of MI6 and the CIA.
However, the thing about including so much detail, is using it to its best advantage, and for me there’s way too much techno-jargon in this book. I got bored very quickly, and found myself skipping paragraphs, looking for the next interesting scene. While Bridge is a great character and I loved her relationships with her sister and Mum, I could happily have chopped fifty pages out of the book without feeling I’d missed anything important.
An interesting and clever book that didn’t quite hit the mark for me.
A fun espionage thriller featuring a gothic geek kick-ass female protag. I did find her a little bit annoying sometimes in this instalment of the series but you know, there's hope for growth. Great pacing & I just couldn't stop listening.
We first meet Brigitte Sharp (Bridge) in Johnston’s first novel, The Exphoria Code – and my, what an introduction it is. With her elite computer skills and intense special training, Sharp is the ideal agent to be sent into the field, and she soon finds herself undercover in Europe, hunting out moles and taking names along the way. At the very last minute, Sharp foils a terrorist attack attempting to use hacked military drone software to deliver a dirty bomb; but this takes its toll on her nerves, and the safety of her family.
The Tempus Project starts with the aftermath of the previous book: Sharp is up for promotion for her heroic antics (but still hindered by the old-fashioned attitudes of the ‘old boy’ network of men in charge), but the celebration is bittersweet; her family are no longer on speaking terms with her. They had a strained relationship anyway, but after almost getting killed, Sharp’s family have decided they want nothing more to do with her.
Sharp is a complex character, and author Johnston reveals more and more of these complexities in this book, as Sharp finds herself in unprecedented circumstances and increasing danger. Johnston also explores the more vulnerable side of Sharp; family dynamics, her struggles in a male-dominated field, the responsibility imbued on her by her team, and her own personal conflict between being in charge but not having things go your way. Things come to a head when Sharp and her team are charged with chaperoning a journalist fleeing Estonia with information pertaining to a secret hacking group financed by the Russians; things go terribly, terribly wrong and Sharp is demoted as team leader, her reputation in tatters.
When a hacking attempt is made on attendees at a G20 summit in London, Sharp sees the connections between the code used for this hack, and the code used for a previous hack on a prominent British politician. Sharp also connects the dots to the information provided by the fleeing journalist – but with the last of her reputation pretty much gone, Sharp faces a cruel choice: go rogue and risk her career, or sit back and let events unfold as they are.
Author Johnston balances action and technology well in his writing, making sense of tech- and cyber- concepts in a way that is exciting and refreshing. By carefully balancing the live-action and the cyber-action, Johnston has crafted an overall explosive thriller that excites on many levels, from physical seat-of-the-pants action to the conspiracy-esque delight of potentially revealing Government secrets. Johnston’s writing is more confident, as is his character and plot development, and I look forward to further books in this series.
In the follow up to the Exphoria Code, Bridge is back and once again is mixing field work and hacking as she continues to deal with the fall out from Exphoria. Personally, her life is even more of a mess, still single, but after the last book, her sense of her own identity and her self worth are getting chipped away as her relationship with her Mother and Sister deteriorates. Professionally things aren't much better. After a disastrous attempt to get a journalist out with information abut a hacking collective back to London, she's sidelined from active duty. Given a watching brief when the G20 is in London, she comes across a hacking attempt on the delegates, which leads to an African nation in revolt, Russian hackers in Estonia, and an ingenious plot using ransomware and cryptocurrency. While the plot is tech driven, it never really feels too technical. There's enough to get the ideas moving on, without swamping the story, and it never really gets beyond that anyone PC savvy wouldn't be able to follow. Of course there's more to it than just the tech with the politics around the SIS, GCHQ, and with the Americans becoming involved the CIA, Parliamentary committees and the diplomacy around the fictional African country all getting to move the plot along. As a side point, the African subplot does feel like an old Yes Minister episode, but that may just be me. All in it means the plot does move on at a fair clip, and with short chapters, its one of those books that keeps you hooked in. There’s a couple of loose ends left, which does make it look like she'll be back, I certainly hope so.
This is the first Brigitte Sharp book that I've read and I really enjoyed it. It's explained what happened in the previous book in conversations that Brigitte has with her therapist and her sister so I didn't feel that I had missed out (although I think I will go back and read it!).
The Tempus Project centres around hacking, ransomware and worms - with some other internet lingo mixed in. I'm already familiar with the terms used (I work in marketing/web development) and didn't find it too technical. But if you're not, they are all explained well and in a non-technical way.
I really liked Brigitte! The cover compares it to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo but Brigitte is not a Lisbeth Salander clone. The only real comparison is that they are both female, goth/alternative and working with technology.
I was quite disheartened by a lot of conversations around how she will shortly be turning 30. Her mother and sister both go on about how 'time is ticking', as though 30 is ANCIENT. It feels a bit bizarre, and I was disappointed that Brigitte doesn't argue with them. They also both tell Brigitte that she needs to 'grow up' and stop with the 'goth phase'. I was so angry for her - and again, she doesn't really seem to argue with them over it, in fact even thinking they may be right. But I can appreciate how she felt - I didn't grow out of my 'goth phase' either. I remember having a similar wobble when I was 29 and thinking 'maybe I am too old for this now' or consider 'trying to be normal' (it did not last). I admit, I did like reading about a character that felt like 'me' (30s, goth, into tech and scifi/fantasy) but better at it all than I am. :)
Her family and her colleagues are all very vivid and their conversations are very well-written. I could particularly picture her colleagues - both the ones she liked, and the ones she didn't! I also liked that she worked with a team of men AND women, and it's recognised that women are as good at coding as the men are.
I loved the storyline. It moves along quickly, and is full of twists and turns. As it progresses, it gets more intense as time starts to run out. This is when Brigitte and her skills come into play! There is a good twist at the end - though the very last chapter did annoy me a little. A few parts of the hacker's plan I figured out before Brigitte did but it still kept me guessing to the very end.
The Tempus Project was a fantastic read. I hope that Brigitte gains more confidence in herself as the books go on and that she realises that 30 isn't 'old'! It's a fast-paced read and will particularly appeal to anyone who has an interest in tech. If you like the TV series Mr Robot and are looking for something similar, this will definitely appeal.
As an ardent fan of Lisbeth Salander, Johnston's Brigitte Sharp is a character almost tailor-made for my tastes. The Tempus Project is an excellent follow-up to Johnston's first Brigitte Sharp novel The Exphoria Code. While I found some of the storyline's punches to be a bit telegraphed, overall I think Johnston did a great job of weaving technical, real-life details into the plot. Brigitte's Sharp's character undergoes a subtle but well-needed evolution that Johnston's will no doubt be able to exploit in future novels. Definitely cannot wait for the next one in this series!
WOW - I absolutely loved this book and cannot wait to read its predecessor, The Exphoria Code. It’s a really exciting read, with car chases, political intrigue, international undercover work and a tense race against time to stop the Tempus malware releasing a huge collection of highly confidential documents into to the world. We follow the characters to Paris, Tallinn and a small African nation-state as Bridge and her colleagues in the SIS and CIA work to shut down the virus.
Johnston pitches the technical detail at just the right level - neither too simplified and patronising, nor overly-complicated and difficult to comprehend. It was easy to follow what Tempus was doing to people’s computers, and what Bridge and her team were doing to address it. I do understand crypto-currency better than before I read this book, but the explanations were part of the story and didn’t make me feel like I was reading a textbook. I also got to feel pretty smart when I figured out a big tech-related twist before Bridge did!
I adored Bridge as a character - she’s smart, no-nonsense, and a goth to boot (spoiler alert - she de-goths for a while, but reverts back in the end - her decision to continue wearing and listening to what she likes was what pushed this book from 4.5 to 5 stars for me!). I found her incredibly relatable: although she excels out in the field, she loves to get her head down at her computer and solve problems, she’s not entirely comfortable with being given a position of authority/responsibility, and while she rightly takes the credit for her successes, she’s very down on herself when things go wrong. I think we’d get along well if she was real!
In fact, while the crime at the centre of The Tempus Project takes place online, human emotions, relationships and communities are a hugely important aspect of the novel. For example, the individual behind the cyber-attack is avenging the death of someone they loved, the situation with the malware and crypto-currency in Africa arises through old-boy connections, and Bridge’s family relationships are a mess due to the dangerous and clandestine nature of her job, and her refusal to bow to convention. Bridge is an established member of online communities of ‘elites’ and regularly draws on their expertise, and I particularly enjoyed the part of the book where she infiltrates a hacker meet-up in Tallinn; these are very much ‘her people’, but in the context of her job, they’re on opposing sides.
The Tempus Project is a smart, high-octane cyber-thriller featuring a heroine after my own heart.
A sort of hacking/spy romp. I enjoyed this character (Brigitte Sharp, she's a goth!) and look forward to reading more in the series. I understood wayyy more of the technical stuff now I'm studying data science, which definitely aided my enjoyment of this book (although it also meant I had to suspend disbelief a little more!).
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader. --- This is the second in a series—but it's not essential to read the first. Bridge will cover everything you need to know in her narration.
Following a botched pickup of a journalist who wants to give some evidence to the British government, Brigitte Sharp—cyber-analyst extraordinaire—is out for payback. Her hunt for those responsible to the op going wrong, as well as a hunt for those to behind a cyber-attack at G20 summit in London, puts her neck-deep in international intrigue (her early guess that there's a connection between the two just adds impetus).
The motives behind these two attacks—in addition to some other cyber-hijinks—is beyond her ability to guess. So Bridge focuses on the how and who, leaving aside the considerations of why for later. It's an exciting ride, full of enough twists and turns to satisfy any thriller reader.
I've always been bugged by it, but Dreyer's English has emboldened me in this particular hang-up: there are significant, multiple-page long, sections in all italics. It'd make the reading process nicer if we didn't need to wade through that. It's a minor thing, but I'd be lying if I didn't say it bugged me.
The tension is played just right. The technobabble* feels authentic—or at least enough to get away with. The plot's intricate without becoming Byzantine. There's plenty of character development, but it felt...forced? By the numbers? Heartless? I can't put my finger on it, but it's like Johnston knew he needed some character development and did what he could to put it in, even if it didn't feel natural or earned. That shortcoming colored the rest of it for me. Still, I liked Bridge and the rest of this cast of characters.
* That's not a term of derision, just trying for an all-encompassing term.
I have a friend who will regularly upbraid me for not liking things as much as he does (he doesn't comment here, it'll be via text, email, or in-person—depending how much he has to say about my wrong-ness). I can easily see where this is one of those books where he—or others—will feel like scolding me for not liking it enough. And they really might be right to do so. I liked this, I recommend it, I just wanted a bit more from it. I can easily see me coming back for another installment, too, I should add.
My thanks to damppebbles blog tours for the invitation to participate in this tour and the materials (including a copy of the novel) they provided.