Beautiful NSA cryptographer and her boyfriend save the NSA’s classified data from a fate worse than deletion. Mostly, I wanted to smack the main characters upside the head and get to the end of the book.

The author, Dan Brown, also wrote The Da Vinci Code, which I found entertaining for the historical references. Mr. Brown’s rollercoaster ride narrative style seems to be his trademark, but the ride is a little rough in Digital Fortress, his first thriller.

The mass-market paperback edition was published by St. Martin’s Paperbacks.