Book Review J
onathan had yet to attend a funeral in his life, but the descent of the elevator into the ground conjured up images of a casket gliding into its grave. Alone in the steel chamber, the silent, indiscernible motion raised the hair on his back, and after thirty seconds he was relieved when a wall rolled away as a door."
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So begins Pacific Wiretap, a new novel by Patrick Downey. Downey, a 37year veteran of the telecommunications industry, has delivered an action-packed adventure with this, his first novel.
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Pacific Wiretap is the story of Jonathan Fox, a telecommunications intern who becomes embroiled in the investigation of a wiretap of an undersea cable network. His journey carries him across the Pacific, through Japan, Guam, Hawaii and California, and in the process he finds love, flees murderers and finds himself doing things that he finds distasteful, but necessary, in order to complete him mission. The action is intense, and most SubTel readers will find the setting instantly relatable. Many of the scenes are set in cable stations or onboard a cable ship.
By Kevin G. Summers In his excellent memoir, On Writing, Stephen King suggests that "people love to read about work. God knows why, but
they do….What you need to remember is that there’s a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not." My one criticism of Pacific Wiretap is that the telecommunications elements of this story read more like a SubTel Forum article than they do a piece of fiction. It's enough to say that Jonathan walked into a conference room and saw a map of international submarine cables on the wall. I don't need to know the RPL and capacity of each system. That said, once the story picked up and Downey found his voice, the telecoms lingo moved to the background where it belongs. Overall, I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to SubTel readers. It's available as both a paperback and digitally for the Amazon Kindle.