Kill Process

Kill Chain #1

by William Hertling

By day, Angie, a twenty-year veteran of the tech industry, is a data analyst at Tomo, the world's largest social networking company; by night, she exploits her database access to profile domestic abusers and kill the worst of them. She can't change her own traumatic past, but she can save other women.    When Tomo introduces a deceptive new product that preys on users’ fears to drive up its own revenue, Angie sees Tomo for what it really is—another evil abuser. Using her coding and hacking expertise, she decides to destroy Tomo by building a new social network that is completely distributed, compartmentalized, and unstoppable. If she succeeds, it will be the end of all centralized power in the Internet.   But how can an anti-social, one-armed programmer with too many dark secrets succeed when the world’s largest tech company is out to crush her and a no-name government black ops agency sets a psychopath to look into her growing digital footprint? “Awesome, thrilling, and a fast-paced portrayal of the startup world, and the perils of our personal data and technical infrastructure in the wrong hands.” —Brad Feld, managing director of Foundry Group “His most ambitious work yet. A murder thriller about high tech surveillance and espionage in the startup world. Like the best of Tom Clancy and Barry Eisner.” —Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project. “Explores the creation and effects of the templated self, the rise of structured identity and one-size-fits-all media culture, and feasible alternatives.” —Amber Case, author of Calm Technology

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Thriller, Audiobook, Mystery, Mystery Thriller, Suspense

424 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 18, 2016

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been overwhelmed with a great number of recent novels that deal directly with hacking lately, and what do you know? It's a blast!

Not only is it stuffed to the gills with 0-Day exploitz and customized onion-router networks now that Tor has been hacked, but we've also got a masters-view of the process from within the tale. It's great. But this is hardly all!

The character twists before we even begin the story are worthy of a novel all on its own.

I mean, how many accolades can you give a woman who Dexters the victimizers of spouse-abuse, has been doing it for years, and has done it only through hacking? In my opinion, there's not enough accolades out there! Sure, sure, it's hacking and sometimes killing, but for the most part she merely puts them out of the way. But 50 victims! And she never got caught! W0w!

And then here's how she killed her own husband and lost her arm in the process, of course, but all of this leads up to the main course-correction of her life.

How to stop the abusive behavior of Tomo! (Read googly, FacePalm, Twitpocalypse, or any other the other social media sites.) They all save your data. Everything. They always have. If you start paying for a package that keeps you private from their targeted ads, then that's all you're paying for. The right to pretend that you're not being tracked.

Her dream is to have a nearly-open-source alternative with complete and utter control over customization in the hands of each user. Have it across a total distributed network, and have competing companies (and not just your trust in a single company) dictate how safe everything you've ever done online is.

Beautiful. Abusive partners, indeed! Is your loved one checking all your email and snooping on your physical location? Are they isolating you and blocking access from all of your friends? Well maybe some serial murderer out there is going to help you out! :)

It's definitely no where near as corny as I make it. It's a great techno-triller and believable every step of the way. The depth of characterization is truly delightful.

I totally recommend this right up with The Sudden Appearance of Hope and The Circle. The pieces they all have in common are pretty amazing. :)

[Yoly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really, really, really liked this book. This being a technothriller, I was expecting a fun book with a straightforward plot and lots of technical jargon. However, I was pleasantly surprised to have found so much more than that in this novel. Angie Benenati, the novel’s protagonist, is not your typical technothriller main character. She is a complex character, she has depth, she has a background story, she has motivations and limitations. She feels real. I wish I could meet Angie and become her BFF :)

While Avogadro’s novels center on a fictional company that reminds us of a search tech giant we use every day, Kill Process centers on another fictional tech giant called Tomo (which is the Spanish word for tome, which is the same as book… you get the idea).

The story touches lightly on subjects like domestic abuse and PTSD, so it gets a bit dark at some points in the story. Contrasted with the amount of techie humor in the novel it is a good balance. The author keeps a perfect pacing advancing the plot and telling us about Angie’s backstory as flashbacks. I couldn’t put this book down.

If you’re in tech, you need to stop everything you’re doing right now and read this book.
If you’re a woman AND in tech, I’m not sure why you haven’t read this book yet.
If you’re neither a woman or in tech, I think you should read it anyway if you like a good thriller.

I got the book on both Kindle and Audible version and the narrator is so good that I mostly listened to the audiobook version. Jane Cramer is a great narrator. I noticed she’s also the narrator for Hertling’s The Turing Exception. I hope she keeps narrating his novels.

I was going to say that this is one of the best books I’ve read this year but I realized it is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

[Janet Newport · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thank you Netgalley and KOBO Writing Life for this arc.

It must be me..... This book has gotten great reviews, but I just couldn't handle it. I made it 43% of the way before giving up entirely. There was so much hacker slang and coding technobabble that I was reminded of the 5 longest years of my life supervising new hires at a CPA firm. I couldn't say "Good Morning" to some of them without them babbling IRS Code Sections and FASB Statements -- VERBATIM --back to me. Yet, if I asked them to DO something, it would bring on a panic attack or they'd pee their pants.

I also found Angie's character to be very dissonant and incoherent. I just couldn't reconcile her actions with her history and ambitions.

While the premise of the story sounded interesting to me (the power of social media in our lives combined with domestic abuse) I found the execution of the story excruciating. DNF

[Gregg Kellogg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a major improvement for William Hertling from his previous Singularity series. It obviously lives in the same general universe as Avogadro Corp, but it's not clear if their futures will converge, or this exists as a kind of "parallel universe". In any case, I'd like to see where this goes. I give it 4 1/2 stars.

The book touches on several major themes:

* The loss of the open web to giants such as Avagadro/Tomo (read Google/Facebook),
* The plight of female programmers in the technical world,
* The hacker ethic, and an exploration of just what the implications are on our increasingly connected world, and what the capabilities of the NSA might actually be in searching through this, and
* The effect of post traumatic stress, and how debilitating it can be.

I thought it dealt with all these themes quite intelligently and effectively. In this world, the protagonist (something of an anti-hero) "Angie" seeks to create an alternative to the closed environment that the web has become, with important profile information stuck inside of big silos such as those maintained by the large social and search giants

I've been somewhat involved the the subjects of decentralized identity, and desegregated profile information such as that promoted by the IndiWeb community. In fact, it's been a major source of work in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Many people have been working on this for a long time, and it would be nice to think that the right startup could make progress in here, but the vested interests, and the general problems with getting this architecture right, have put this off for some time. Recently, there are increased efforts to create The Web we Want and to create a web of meaning using Linked Data, which ironically, has taken a big step forward with support for schema.org by all those looking to rank high in search results. While I don't think the IndieWeb will make this happen, a lot of the philosophy embodied by this community is what will make this a reality.

In the book, a small group of plucky programmers in Portland endeavor to make this happen, in spite of strong forces trying to thwart them. It makes for a good thriller, and a great examination of the themes of the book.

I recommend this for web geeks, and those who want a believable (if technically dense) techno-thriller. Hertling has really become a great voice in this area, and I look forward to what he comes up with next.

[Terence M - [Quot libros, quam breve tempus!] · Rating 1 out of 5]

Audiobook - 12:45 hours - Narrator: Jane Cramer
Listened to: 04:43 hours - Balance: 08:02 hours.
Nominated as a "sci-fi thriller", not one of my usual genres, the blurb was intriguing enough for me to try this novel as a break-out because of its "kick-ass" one-handed heroine protagonist.
During the first two hours or so, the heroine uses her super fantastic hacking expertise to profile and identify domestic abusers and ultimately kill the worst of them.
Interesting enough I thought, and I was mostly au fait with all the technobabble, but over the next two hours she decides that her employer, a mega-"sort-of Facebook", is contributing to the reasons behind the sexual abuse of women. Or maybe she thought that her employer was abusing everybody through its manipulation of its advertising revenue, I'm not really sure. Whatever, she decides to build, from the ground up, the world's biggest social network and put her employer out of business.
One third into the book and she put me out of business!

[❤Marie Gentilcore · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book a lot. It starts out with main character Angie killing wife abusers she finds by using her access to data at a social media company that seemed an awful lot like Facebook. Then it switches to Angie creating an alternative social media company. Then we learn that someone wants Angie ruined. We also learn about Angie's past. The story moved along at a quick, easy to read pace and I hated having to put it down. Now I anxious to read more by this author.

[Stuart Langridge]

This reminds me of the Daniel Suarez books. It's written by someone who clearly is a techie -- Hertling describes himself on Twitter as being a Web strategist (which seems OK, since I'd probably call myself the same thing) and a Ruby developer (nobody's perfect). It's from a small press rather than a major, which is nice because it means I can get it DRM-free from Smashwords.

Hertling is writing about today's world, but all the big companies have alternate names. So, the hero of this story works at "Tomo", who are Facebook. Mentioned in passing are "Avogadro" who are clearly Google (and I believe he's written a bunch of other books about this Avogadro Corp as well), "Braeburn" who are Apple, and so on. This tissue-thin disguise requires a tiny amount of decoding, but anyone who is even close to the tech knowledge required here will not have a problem. This book is heavy, heavy on technology. Now, I didn't have a problem with any of it (and it's rare to find something like this which doesn't shy away from the detail while still being real), but it's hard to tell how much someone who isn't me would get lost by all the throwaway talk about SQL injections and so on. But, if you're on my side of the fence, you'll enjoy the detail. That's good stuff. A diversion into the IndieWeb ideas of POSSE is rather excellent too.

I also think that if you're not a techie yourself you'd be pretty shocked by the level of access that "Tomo" have to data; they can root through everything about you, whether you actively use it or not since the app snoops heavily on everything you do, and more importantly they know this and know how to mine their gargantuan database for best results. Again, someone coming from the same place as me is not likely to be particularly shocked; Snowden opened our eyes to this sort of thing.

A warning: the book deals with domestic abuse. No incidents are particularly graphically portrayed, and the abuse isn't actually a centrepiece of the book in itself, but Angie, the hero, is a survivor of abuse and the story is told from her point of view. This does, at times, make it difficult reading, although frankly reading about this sort of thing ought to be difficult and more importantly that shouldn't stop all of us from doing it.

That aside, there are two issues I have with the book as a whole. Neither are enough to invalidate anything I said above, but they do both separately and in combination rather colour my experience reading.

The first is the book's rather ambivalent attitude towards some of Angie's activities. Without spoiling, she takes a set of exceptionally extreme actions at various points. She believes they're justified, but, well... there's little to no attempt either in-universe or at a meta level to put the other side of that case. Even after moving on from the early extremes, she routinely and unblushingly reaches for some exceedingly invasive and unpleasant techniques, only occasionally even bothering to say "the ends justify the means" inside her own head. I'd have liked to have seen more nuance there. Joe Abercrombie's Last Argument of Kings asks whether the Devil knows he is the Devil, and it might be a question worth asking Angie as well.

Now, I'm not necessarily calling for all bad people to be punished -- this isn't a childrens' fairy-tale -- but the book kinda is, and that's my second complaint. It all goes rather Hollywood. In real actual life, there aren't actually that many moustache-twirling Disney villains. Here, the first two thirds of the book are accurately depicting that -- Angie's troubles are real. She's fighting for funding; she's finding it hard to hold everything together; she's alienating friends when she doesn't want to but can't find a way to get everything she wants done to get done. I sympathised with her rather a lot; this is how the world is, where your problems come greyly on a list and the thing you fight is bureaucracy and indifference and being squashed between the spinning wheels of money with little regard or interest paid to your plan and how much you want it. There isn't a Bad Guy who breaks off from tying damsels to the railroad tracks to cackle and individually target you, and that means that you can't win by revealing that the Bad Guy is in fact a Bad Guy and get him arrested. That's what happens in films, where you want a big swelling crescendo of music and we see the hero win through in the end. Life is not like this. We do not live in the universe from The Mighty Ducks. The bad people don't throw children into jet turbines for a laugh. I know it makes for a good story, and if I'm in the mood for that sort of story then it's good reading. Garion beats Torak; Thomas Covenant beats Lord Foul; everyone gets married and lives happily ever after. But Kill Process is not a fantasy story. The majority of the book is relentlessly real; that reality is totally compromised by how Angie wins at the end like she's Simba getting Scar ousted and sent to the hyenas. So I don't know how to feel about it all. Did I like the tech? Yes. Did I learn something about Angie's situation, and how it might be to see life through those eyes, and perhaps sympathise more than I did before? Yes. But her struggles feel cheapened by the childish quality of the total victory where she pulls off the ghost's mask and it turns out to have been Old Man Withers trying to get the orphanage shut down. Real stories don't actually end with the protagonist "winning". Admittedly this is a story and life isn't a story and nobody buys books that just look like the life they live every day -- you don't need a book for that, just read your own diary. Having Angie "win" by fighting off a hostile takeover bid and then getting to 6% of the market and sticking there, never going above that, would have been something like a documentary rather than a thriller. But the book doesn't know what it wants to be; a hard-nosed tale of technological espionage and startups, or a child's book where the hero gets two hundred billion dollars and vindication while the bad guy goes to jail. If anything, it's too easy. If you want to bring down "Tomo" through the power of the IndieWeb (which I am entirely in favour of), you're not gonna get to do it by getting "Lewis" the CEO banged up for procuring murders. It cheapens the message to suggest that that's the way. That would be easy.

There's a good book here though. If you're into tech, recommended. If you aren't, read it and let me know whether it makes any sense to you.

[Saphana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brad here nailed it. There's nothing to add.

Some personal remarks regarding this book.

As a person with a comparable background and profession to the MC, I can testify to the realism of the procedures + software described. This is not sci-fi. This is real. It's one of the reasons I don't have a Facebook account and hide behind as much protection when online, as possible. The technology described and used isn't even "new" or exotic, it's practically standard.

There was a number in this book, namely: the occurence of domestic violence among members of the U.S. police forces amounts to around 40%. This blew my mind and -since I don't believe anything, I haven't checked for myself- I went in search of data. It's true:

"Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population. A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24 percent, indicating that domestic violence is two to four times more common among police families than American families in general." Cops "typically handle cases of police family violence informally, often without an official report, investigation, or even check of the victim's safety," the summary continues. " (Source - for the link to the studies, scroll down). It was obvious with "Black Lifes Matter" that the U.S. has some severe problem with the psychological standards of their police force. This number, however, signifies that the problem is much bigger than I previously assumed.

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes I'm glad, I'm not a U.S. citizen.

[Janani · Rating 5 out of 5]

DUDE this book needs more hype it's the perfect, rich tech thriller I needed for my blood.

[Jannelies (living between hope and fear) · Rating 5 out of 5]

During one of my first jobs, some 40 years ago, I worked in a ‘computer department’, where the computer was a very big machine, tended to by serious looking guys in white coats. I was only allowed to handle the kilometers of printed paper the thing spewed out every morning.
Skip to 1982 and hey, enter the word processor – some sort of a computer anyway. I was immediately hooked and wanted nothing more than to work with the machine. Two years later, and personal computers were introduced at my workplace. And ten years later, the Internet was available for everybody who could afford a computer.
It’s 36 years later now and sometimes young people don’t even understand what I’m saying when telling about those machines. What was once science fiction, is now history.
I read SF books in which is predicted that one day we all will be connected, and not only connected but also dependent on a global network. And yes, some of those stories warn us against what is happening for some time now, with companies like Google and platforms like Facebook.
And although the Internet certainly has its blessings (Goodreads, for instance ;-) ) it is not always safe and sometimes plain dangerous.
Kill Process tells us all. Angie uses her knowledge in a good way and a bad way. She wants to help abused woman but finding all about the abusive husbands and then killing them is not exactly the right way to do so. But she, herself a victim, sees different. But when she finds out, finally I might say, that with Tomo the customer is not the customer but the product, she rethinks her life and sets out to do something really good. This thriller is very well written, with an interesting plot and most of all extensive knowledge of all matters IT and the capability to explain this to readers who might not remember how exciting it felt to discover you could connect to people all over the world with just a few keystrokes. For people who have no idea about how a computer actually works behind all the colorful buttons. And maybe also for people who still think that you have some privacy left.
What I absolutely loved was Angie ‘grokking’ sometimes… but that is another story.

[Lukasz · Rating 4 out of 5]

What sets you apart from death is a few hours of Angie’s work in front of the computer. She needs no violence; access to Wi-Fi will do. She’ll find your weak spot and find a way to use technology to assist your demise. If you’re a decent human being, fear nothing. If however, you’re an abuser who catches her attention, you’re done.

Her work for Tomo, the biggest social media company, gives her access to all kinds of data. And she knows how to use them to wreak havoc thousands of kilometers from her victim. Initially, I thought the book would follow a string of ingenious murders, but it took another turn.

Angie turns from hacker/serial killer to a start-up founder willing to oppose the biggest of abusers – Tomo, who has users’ privacy for nothing. Now, Angie is an interesting and complex heroine with a traumatic past. A self-proclaimed killer with PTSD, social anxiety, and fear of men (explained later in the book). I assumed it would be difficult to relate to her but I was wrong. By the third of the book, I was cheering for her success.

Good characters combined with an intriguing plot and thoughts about how we no longer control our own content (not to mention privacy) result in an addicting read.

[Fahad Naeem · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't have words to describe Kill Process. It was too good. Mind boggling. Great writers have low budget to come into the limelight. I thank bookhub to recommend me this splendid book. I know many of my friends will not like it but it was my type of book as if it found me.

I enjoyed it this much that I deliberately slowed it down; afraid of losing the joy if read in one night.
I tried to find any discrepancy in it but found none. How can you find it from this type of awesome literature? This is THE type of book that reshapes your life and gives you goosebumps every time you think of it.

I loved the character of Angie although William tried to be a hardcore feminist but I forgave him for this. I also loved Amber but William didn't bring in and did it with Iglo instead.

I won't be recommending this to anyone, because it requires extra effort to enjoy, value and credit this book. I'm looking forward to read more books of William in 2019.

[Angelo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book! If you do not have it on your "to read" list then I highly recommend you add it!

[Soo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Notes:

I got this book during one of Audible's sales.
- Good job of describing trauma & PTSD effects.
- Terrible tech.
- Unbelievable plot elements that break all suspension of belief.

If my library has the other books in the series, I'd read it, but I would not buy the books at full price.

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

First of all let me say that this book contained some of the most realistic descriptions of PTSD, panic attacks and thought patterns of people who suffer from a mental illness that I have read in a long time. I have a high respect for Hertling's effort to portray these things as realistically and honestly as possible. Add to that the quite realistic tech and hacking angle as well as some well laid out criticism of the monopolization in the tech sector and I really wanted to like this book.

Unfortunately the very one-sided portrayal of abusive relationships (men are always the perpetrators while women are always victims) within "Kill Process" really annoyed the hell out of me. Add to that the constant woman-power pep talk dissing "old white man" and Hertling's novel can't rid itself of the suspicious smell of cheap virtue signaling towards the contemporary SJW third wave feminist crowd.

Even though Hertling admits in the afterword that abusers come in all genders, his book portrays a very different picture and one has to wonder whether he has really dug as much into the numbers as he claims he did. All serious studies come to the conclusion that male victimization in abusive relationships comes at rates very similar to that of women and researchers agree that there is gender symmetry prevalent in abuse issues. Not to mention that it is often way harder for men to deal with abuse in relationships due to a) less social acceptance of male victims and b) little to no institutions and help lines that are actually dealing with male victims of abuse. In fact most of them explicitly turn down male victims when contacted.

However despite these facts in Hertling's book all men are power hungry abusers, violent and malicious. Or they are pale yes-man without much of a thought of their own like Angie's boyfriend Thomas who stumbles through the story like a mindless idiot. The worst offender however is Hertling's portrayal of the government man trying to hunt down Angie. His obsession with sexual abuse and violence against women is so over the top it is almost hilarious. Jesus, could you be less on the nose? We get it: Men are all psychotic sexual predators waiting to happen!

All of this is not helped by the fact that Hertling drops all sense of logic towards the last third of the book and technical feasibility goes right out the window with it, thereby turning "Kill Process" into another generic near-future techno thriller that tries to impress with over the top hacking solutions and cliched characters doing dumb and irrational things while never really knowing what it wants to be: A psychological thriller? A start-up novel? A feminist romance?

There is potential here as mentioned in the beginning and Hertling surely knows how to pace a novel once he had gotten a grip on where he wanted to take things (which unfortunately took him about two thirds of the book where he was all over the place). There is a lot of stuff that needs work here but I will keep an eye on Hertling nonetheless and see what he comes up with next.

[Trever · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well-written book full of fascinating tech stuff, which ultimately suffered from being too uneven for me. The heroine is a damaged woman, the victim of a former abusive relationship, who now works quietly in the heart of data analysis at a huge Facebook-like social network. The story kicks off like dynamite as we meet her in the process of using her own custom search algorithms to ID suspected abusers online. She then investigates them, determines if there is real abuse happening, and if so, she murders them using her formidable arsenal of hacking skills.

I was grabbed right from the outset and looking forward to an exciting tale of techno cat-and-mouse, but about 20% into the story, it changes course so massively you feel like the Bandit just pulled another handbrake turn. Frustrated with the brutal corporate behavior of her own employer, Angie drops her killing ways and instead sets out to start her own moral & ethical social network without centralized control (We've seen how well that worked out in real life with Diaspora).

And... that's the bulk of the book. The mid-section really ground me down, because it absolutely buries itself in the technical and monetary minutia of creating a tech startup business. Maybe this would be riveting stuff to someone doing the same thing, but I run a business myself and found the central 8 hours+ of money worries and billing and payroll panic to be way too much like the daily stresses of my normal life to really enjoy reading about it.

It picks up again in the final 20% and turns into a terrific tale of corporate espionage and tech stalking, and carries to a bang-up climax worthy of any great thriller. It was such a great and clever ending I wished it had gone on longer, and ultimately, that's my chief complaint with the book and why I docked it two stars - I really feel like the central money-chasing chunk should have been shortened substantially, and the final act's killer/spy tension been brought forward earlier into the story to keep the pace and the tension up. As it is, it's enjoyable but really uneven - Be sure you have the tolerance for long chapters about internet techno jargon and angel-investor-chasing before you commit to this one.

[Ralph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most excellent! My favorite Hertling book thus far.

My introduction to William Hertling's writing was Avogadro Corp (book one of the Singularity series), a speculative fiction novel set in the near future that postulates on the rise of true Artificial Intelligence and the impact on humanity.

What I really enjoy about Mr. Hertling's books is the authenticity of the technical material that provides the backdrop to his stories and makes his books so captivating to me. Kill Process is an excellent example. Set in the present day, the novel explores how technology, social media, and big data analysis leads to abuse and the loss of privacy. While it may be tempting to paint the issues raised in the book in black and white terms, the author doesn't take that approach, allowing the reader to consider the issues and come to her or his own conclusion.

Narrator Jane Cramer does an outstanding job breathing life into Angie "Angel of Mercy" Benenati, a brilliant and complex protagonist whose PTSD both drives and hinders her.

There is a lot happening in the plot including flashbacks to Angie's past, her introduction as a teenager to private forums & white-hat hacking, coping with PTSD, tackling online bullying & spousal abuse, how it is possible for someone to obtain an insanely large amount of personal information about someone, and even the pitfalls of obtaining funding for a start-up.

If you love a good techno-thriller that doesn't leave you asking yourself, "How can this ever happen?", I think you will enjoy this one.

Recommended.

[Sean Randall · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What made you decide to build Tapestry?” Where do I begin? I can’t say killing people eats away at the fragile remains of my humanity

Wow. I started reading this and fell into the mindset of "another heroin with traumatic history?" but it really and 100% worked. She's cool, and the world of geek somehow fits around the corporate like it was meant to. Snappy sentences like “You haven’t committed any code in five days. You’re not fine” and “There’s a second copy of the video on an SSD in the freezer” add authenticity and realism to a landscape quite conceivably today and here and now.

I was hooked, and the intense scene at the end of chapter 45 was a highlight. That's the sort of writing that makes a building story very much worth ones while. I want to finish the Avogadro books now; this novel has given me a new appreciation of Hertling's writing.

[Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating and engaging thriller that will have you thinking twice about whatever cybersecurity solutions you might THINK you have in place on your phone, computer, and toaster. A very fun read, I almost read all the way through in one sitting (but it was actually two sittings). If you are at all interested in computers, security, internet startups, and/or the IoT then you will enjoy this eye-opening book.

[BabyLunLun · Rating 2 out of 5]

Books sounds very interesting but really wasn't for me.

Its very very technical and I feel most of the time the author is trying to show off his knowledge than deliver a great story. If I wan something technical I would pick up a textbook so nope

[megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though coding/programming is my least favorite aspect of engineering, it didn’t keep me from enjoying this story. I’m actually quite proud of what I do remember *tiny pat on back*

[Abdul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kill Process is a thrilling, creepy and modern-day story of Angie, a data analyst by day and vigilante hacker and killer by night.

Angie is a one-armed, anti-social and extremely talented data analyst (and secretly a hacker) who works at Tomo, the world's biggest social media company (suspiciously similar to Facebook but obviously the name cannot be used in the book!) who later decided to leave Tomo to create her own Social Media startup to destroy the centralized power of the Internet and Tomo and create a de-centralized, federated social media platform that gives power back to the users.

Angie has suffered domestic abuse and a traumatic experience which resulted in her loosing an arm.

Unable to deal with her trauma, she made it her mission to help potential victims of domestic abuse by eliminating their abusers. Her access to the world's largest user database and her data analytics skills put her in a prime position to abuse her power to spot, locate and deliver vigilante justice to men who abuse their partners.

Angie weapon of choice is technology. She does not get her hands dirty but uses modern-day technology to deliver death and justice in an untraceable way to her targets.

This is the creepiest part of the book. The technologies used and the references made to technology and tools used to assassinate her targets are very possible to carry out in today's interconnected world.

The book also highlights the real-world intricacies of Tech Startup world, Privacy and Internet freedom, Mass-Surveillance and the dependence on Social Media.

Many real world references are made to events such as NSA leaks and to technologies such as Onion Network (Tor), Raspberry Pi's, Wireless Hacking etc.

If you are a technology person you will doubly enjoy this book as the author goes into great length to describe the technology Angie is using but not in a dull way to alienate non-technical readers.

Non-Technical readers will enjoy a very thrilling story with more action than just behind a keyboard but they will also have their eyes open to a darker side of the Internet and this will be hugely educational as well as a fun and thrilling story.

I have immensely enjoyed this book and immersed myself in the book by listening to it through Audible and read it at the same time to feel the suspense in Angie's words.

[Denis Hancock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really hits the spot if you're into IT Security
I read a few reviews about this before I read it and noted that some people winged about the techno babble.
Well, you don't read a book on Brain Surgery if you don't have some basic concept of medicine.
In any case, a person with no technical aptitude could still forgo and forgive some of the anagrams and jargon and still get some decent entertainment from this story. I LOVED it !
I found it well written, the plot and characters were easy to understand and overall gave it 5 Stars.
Thanks William

[Mohammad · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5, an amazing story.

This book is about social networks, big data , cyber security, privacy, startups, venture capitals etc.

It's about a data analyst/hacker who got fed up with abusive FB like social network and decided to build a distributed social network but first she must win over her inner demons and the biggest social network.

I really enjoyed it.

Highly recommended!

[Mira · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've so many issues with the book I don't even know where to start!
The book was a meandering mess. Its start was completely misleading. There is no deep look into the psyche of an abused woman who murders to save others like her. No, this is the story of the drudgery and pain of the process every start-up goes through apparently.

As boring and tedious as the plot turned out to be, it's not really the issue. The problem is in the characters and how the author handled them. Angie and Chris are pretty much the same kind of people. They employ the same methods to destroy others lives. Yet, the reader is supposed to see Chris, who is a horrible person no doubt about it, as evil and Angie as ... what exactly? I've no idea.
Angie, who makes it her life's mission to create a social network that respects its users' privacy, has regularly invaded and violated the privacy of others. Without an ounce of regret. And all of a sudden, I'm supposed to see her as an advocate for privacy? What?!

Also, how her crimes never came to light. How she gets her happily-ever-after, without any repercussions just pisses me off. I know that it's a fact of life that crimes sometimes, lots of times sadly, go unpunished, and in fiction, that's completely okay. But don't call a murderer a good person simply because she has a traumatic past and because she kills people who actually deserve to be prosecuted/punished/rot in jail! She abandoned her crusade of killing all abusive men (as if only men can be abusive or as if there is no other methods of fighting abuse,) when she started her company. Which leaves the reader damn sure that she killed, first and foremost, for herself. Not to save anyone. She even admits it at one point that it's about having power and control over something. So, a company takes the place of murdering people, and hell, at least now she can marry her Gary Stu of a boyfriend in peace, without 'lying to him'. Because that's so much worse than killing people, of course.

I think that's it for me. I won't be trying any other Hertling books for the foreseeable future.

[Kate S · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is bait and switch. You’re lured into picking up the title with an interesting premise- serial killer hacker whose victims are abusers. But then, with no build up, character struggle, or any reasoning whatsoever, the main character decides she doesn’t want that life, quits cold turkey, and spends the next 2/3 of the book boring us with the minutiae of building an internet startup. It makes a 180 degree turn from “thriller” to the longest and most boring Shark Tank pitch mixed with an episode of Silicon Valley devoid of any humor or plot development.

The only saving point of the book was that it is refreshing to read about a fictional hacker where the author at least understands the tech. So many authors use hacking as a cheap plot device and you just have to take their word that the hacker is awesome and nobody can catch or stop them. This book at least details (and accurately) how she would gain access and do the things she did. But the praise for this can only go so far. The technical jargon must be absolutely exhausting for someone not in the know. I’m in a cyber security field and even I was getting fatigued by it. Outlining coding techniques or how the bitcoin market was manipulated does not make up for minimal plot and character development.

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up Kill Process by William Hertling on a whim after seeing it short-listed as a Goodreads best book in SF.

I'm glad I did because it was a surprisingly great read. Angie's an experienced employee in the tech industry, working for a large social networking company. She decides to quit and create her own company, but one that's made of individual companies integrating their platforms so that there's no one central multinational controlling people's data - but the owners of the old company don't like it. Add to that she's a domestic violence survivor, the story has a realistic punch to it.

It doesn't read as your standard SF novel, more computer science thriller, but there's a huge amount of technical information on hacking, exploits, data analysis, etc., as the author is ex-industry himself.

It also delves into the psych of abuse victims, which is at times quit heartfelt, and also the unconventional way Angie finds out about and helps current victims. The pace is quick throughout the whole novel, the characters believable (many in the typical geek-introvert way), and the ending is one to savor.

Recommended if this sounds like your thing - 4.5/5

[Darren · Rating 4 out of 5]

You think you know what's happening when you watch the news, when you hear special reports, when people around you are talking about technology. Read this book and you will find out we don't know nearly as much as we think. Angie, not only use this technology to seek justice, but to do so much more! If you are in and abusive relationship, or know someone who is, you will really be on Angie's side. If you look at this book from the standpoint of most people, no matter what we feel, we should not take justice in our own hands. Read this book and find out exactly what I mean. Sometimes the things we do can come back to bite us. While you are reading this book, remember, all of the technological events are currently going on as we speak. By the time you are finished with this book, you will definitely be thinking a little differently about how you use your own personal technology, no matter what form it may take.

[Bryan Ewert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kill Process starts off with an interesting premise: A programmer at a monopolistic social network uses her access to users' private information to feed her compulsion for justice. To capital ends.

And then suddenly this whole story is shoved to the background as the novel becomes a "how to build your own tech startup" guide. Or cautionary tale. I'm not sure which. With all of the tech stack design, project planning and budgetary meetings it honestly felt a bit too much like I was at work. The premise that fueled my interest in this book fizzled early, and never recovered.

The ending was less than satisfying as well, as many of my feelings towards the protagonist's actions at the beginning were left unresolved.

Certainly, don't read this book if you're the least bit embittered and mistrustful towards the lack of personal privacy rampant in today's tech giants. Frankly, this will only push you further to despair.

[Brianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author, William Hertling, really stepped up his game. The main protagonist, Angie Benenati, is a very complex and well thought out character. I don't know if this is in part of the Singularity Series universe, or not, but Avogadro is in here. Also, the way the corporations in the book are similar to ours, just named different. (Avogadro == Google/Android & Tomo == Facebook) . There is a lot of hacker/hacking related stories in this book, which brought back memories when I was a kid back in the 80's .. :)

If you enjoy Sci-Fi technothrillers, this will be a book you will enjoy. Highly addicting, and hard to put down.