Ebook, 279 pages
Published June 23, 2021 by Tilted Windmill Press.
Murder on the Sysadmin Express
After accidentally solving two murders, Dale Whitehead hungers to stay in his apartment, hack virtual memory stacks, and forget the whole thing. Instead, his boss sends him to a technology/sci-fi convention in Detroit. He plans to endure his stint at the vendor table, stumble through his presentation, and escape anonymously.
A dead body ruins everything.
Dale finds himself battling liquid nitrogen ice cream, balky network addressing schemes, the Chaos Machine, and his own reputation, while the corpses pile up.
“Wait to see if it happens again:” Great for troubleshooting IPv6 multicast over wireless. Not so much for murder.
This novel was just as enjoyable as reading MWL’s “git commit murder.”
And I loved the fine geekdom tongue-in-cheek details like solving a murder open-source style “with enough eyes, all murders are shallow” (nicely channeling Linus’s law - given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow).
This is one sequel I've been actively waiting for, and it has many of same elements which made the first book (/git commit murder/) in the (hopefully continuing!) series appealing. There's a decent mystery plot (and who doesn't like a mystery?), but moreover the protagonist, Dale Whitehead, is an extremely interesting, sympathetic, and (and, perhaps sadly, at times) relatable character.
There are parts of the books which perhaps will most appeal to a fairly niche audience: that is, people with some knowledge of the underpinnings of UNIX (also, people who understand computer networking; also, people who know about how members of tech communities interact). If you do know a bit about any of those things, those parts of the book are especial treats. But one needn't be a UNIX guru to read and enjoy the book, any more than one need be a wizard (or a hobbit) to read and …
This is one sequel I've been actively waiting for, and it has many of same elements which made the first book (/git commit murder/) in the (hopefully continuing!) series appealing. There's a decent mystery plot (and who doesn't like a mystery?), but moreover the protagonist, Dale Whitehead, is an extremely interesting, sympathetic, and (and, perhaps sadly, at times) relatable character.
There are parts of the books which perhaps will most appeal to a fairly niche audience: that is, people with some knowledge of the underpinnings of UNIX (also, people who understand computer networking; also, people who know about how members of tech communities interact). If you do know a bit about any of those things, those parts of the book are especial treats. But one needn't be a UNIX guru to read and enjoy the book, any more than one need be a wizard (or a hobbit) to read and enjoy the Lord of the Rings. The author has done careful work to make sure the contexts make any tech discussion comprehensible enough even without specialised knowledge.
The mystery here (as in the preceding book) is interesting, but, again, I think the most appealing aspect is the protagonist. While it's a rather different story and setting, getting inside Dale's head gives me similar feeling to the one I get from the inner monologues of the protagonist in Martha Wells' "Murderbot" series (so I'd recommend this series to fans of that one, and vice-versa).
That is, a character who is extremely capable, but also severely hampered by their own mental processes and the anxieties spun out by them. This is an extremely relatable situation, and so following along with Dale (or Murderbot) is somehow reassuring and affirming in a way that I think is actually quite hard to capture. But Lucas does it here, and he does very well.
