Reamde

Reamde is a technothriller novel by Neal Stephenson, published in 2011. The story, set in the present day, centers on the plight of a hostage and the ensuing efforts of family and new acquaintances, many of them associated with a fictional MMORPG, to rescue her as her various captors drag her about the globe. Topics covered range from online activities including gold farming and social networking to the criminal methods of the Russian mafia and Islamic terrorists.
Plot summary.
Zula Forthrast, an adopted Eritrean, is given a job by her billionaire uncle, Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, at his company, Corporation 9592, which runs an MMORPG called "T'Rain." Zula and her boyfriend, Peter, visit Richard's cat-skiing resort. Desperate for money, Peter sells a database of stolen credit card numbers to a shady contact, who is in fact working for the Russian mob. The transaction inadvertently results in a T'Rain-based ransomware virus infecting the contact's laptop and rendering the only copy of the database useless. Ivanov, a senior gangster behind the deal, tracks Peter down and coerces him and Zula to help him find the virus creators in Xiamen, China.
Upon arriving in China, Peter, Zula, and Sokolov (a former Spetsnaz security consultant hired by Ivanov), locate the virus creators’ apartment. The Russian team prepares to raid the apartment, only to be misdirected by Zula into a random apartment, which coincidentally happens to house Islamic terrorists preparing to bomb an international conference soon to take place in the city. In the subsequent gun battle, Ivanov kills Peter, and Abdallah Jones, the head of the Islamist cell, kills Ivanov. The hackers flee the building as a fire sets off the stored explosives and causes it to collapse. Jones flees with Zula as his hostage. Olivia Halifax-Lin, an MI6 agent posted to Xiamen to manage surveillance on Jones, meets Sokolov during his escape from the building, and the two become romantically involved while in hiding.
Jones and Zula covertly fly from China into the Canadian wilderness and move south toward the US border. Jones plans to use Zula to force Richard to help him cross the border using a secret smuggling route known to Richard. Meanwhile, Sokolov is separated from Olivia and narrowly escapes from Xiamen by sea, eventually entering the US in pursuit of Jones. Olivia is reassigned by MI6 to locate Jones in cooperation with the CIA but suspects that both agencies' traditional approaches are inadequate for the task. Olivia and Sokolov reunite and travel to the US-Canada border independently based on her intuition.
Eventually, all of the main characters converge on Richard's ski resort and its US-side counterpart, where Richard's brothers live with a community of Christian isolationists and heavily armed Second Amendment fanatics. The terrorists camp in a location near the resort and inform Richard of their hostage, forcing him to lead them into the US while a small team detonates a suicide bomb near a border crossing as a distraction. After being used as bait, Zula manages to escape and heads out to rescue her uncle. Meanwhile, US-based terrorist cells converge on the community from the south, and protagonists and terrorists end up battling in a massive gunfight. In the end, the terrorists are stopped, and Richard kills Jones.
Reception.
Writing in the "Irish Examiner", Val Nolan called "Reamde" "one of the smartest, fastest-moving, and most consistently enjoyable novels of the year". It is, Nolan went on, a "painstakingly-researched, deftly-plotted roller-coaster of gigabytes and gunplay, a pitch-perfect pastiche of Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy-style techno-thrillers and a comment on contemporary digitality and the ubiquity of online interconnectivity."
Rowan Kaiser for "The A.V. Club" gives "Reamde" an A− rating saying: "The marriage of the thrilling and the nerdy is what makes "Reamde" work, and it offers a glimpse at a fascinating writer making a welcome transition back into a more accessible style."
"Kirkus Reviews" sums up "Reamde" as: "An intriguing yarn—most geeky, and full of satisfying mayhem."
Cory Doctorow writes in his "Boing Boing" review: "Stephenson's several exquisitely choreographed shoot-outs (including an epic, 100+ page climactic mini-war) are filled with technical gubbins about guns that convey the real and genuine enthusiasm of a hardcore gun-nut, with so much verve, so much moment, that I found myself itching to find a firing range and try some of this stuff out for myself."
Michelle West, reviewing the novel for "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction", did not consider the book to be science fiction and called it "a geek thriller." She wrote, "Even if I don't "like" characters Stephenson's created, I nonetheless find them engaging, and I read him in large part for his characters and the particular ways in which they process information and interact with the world. Of his novels, this has easily the most structurally solid ending. In feel, it's closest to "Cryptonomicon", although all of the action takes place in the present, where information travels quickly, and cellphones and wifi are ubiquitous. I enjoyed it greatly, and I frequently laughed out loud at his descriptions or his dialogue; it read like a much shorter book."
In an interview, Paul Di Filippo called "Reamde" "the most gripping and funny and wise thriller I've ever read."
"Entertainment Weekly" called it "an ingenious epic" in their "Must List" column.