Hooked: A Thriller About Love and Other Addictions by Matt Richtel

From the Publisher

Nat Idle, a San Francisco writer with a medical degree, narrowly survives an explosion in an Internet café after a stranger hands him a note warning him to exit immediately. The handwriting on the note belongs to his deceased girlfriend, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist whom he has obsessively been mourning.

So begins HOOKED, a pop thriller for the Digital Age, narrated with the force and the pace of an intimate email dispatch you can't stop reading. Each chapter of this novel will keep listeners hooked as Nat Idle searches for the love of his life in the midst of manipulation and conspiracy.
Just as previous generations were influenced by movies, today we are becoming hooked on Internet technology, which is changing the way we read, think, and dream. HOOKED vividly illustrates how technology is turning us into a national of addicts. It will make you rethink your relationship with your computer and your mobile phone.

Publishers Weekly

This oddly flat thriller from first-time novelist Richtel opens with a warning in a dead girlfriend's handwriting, followed by an explosion in a San Francisco cafe. Nat Idle, who barely escapes, is perplexed by the note: his girlfriend Annie--from a very wealthy family involved in various opaque concerns--was swept off her sailboat four years ago and never seen again. Nat tracks down survivors of the blast, including waitress Erin Coultran, whose actions make Nat suspicious; when the home of aspiring novelist Simon Anderson, another survivor, catches on fire, Nat's suspicions intensify. Nat's investigations take him to Strawberry Labs, Annie's family company possibly named after Annie's childhood Labrador retriever. Despite intentionally short chapters à la The Da Vinci Code, Richtel (who writes the comic strip Rudy Park under nom de plume Theron Heir) has trouble bringing Nat to life or tension to the plot--in part because of Nat's first-person flashbacks to his relationship with Annie. Richtel's trying to do a brainy update of classic noir, but falls slightly short.(June)

Kirkus Reviews

Corporate shenanigans drive this erratic suspense novel, Richtel's debut. Narrator Nat Idle is a young medical journalist in San Francisco. His greatest professional accomplishment has been an article which led to the conviction of a cop for assaulting a prostitute. His personal accomplishment was snagging Annie Kindle, a dynamic investment banker working for her father, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist; alas, Annie died in a drowning accident four years ago, and Nat still feels the pain. He's sitting in a cafe when a woman drops a note on his table telling him to get out. He does; seconds later, the cafe explodes. The weirdest part is that the note was in Annie's handwriting. Nat is unhurt, though the explosion killed five people. It's not a comfort that the investigation is being led by the brother of the cop he'd had convicted. Richtel keeps the pace fast, mixing flashbacks to Annie and her hard-nosed father with Nat's own sleuthing, aided by Erin, a waitress at the cafe and another survivor; she appears on the up and up, but has a complicated history involving arson. We get a little bit of everything (romantic interludes, dangerous house fires, mysteriously encrypted computer programs) but not enough of anything; characterizations are paper-thin. Credibility breaks down when Nat's acupuncture session with Samantha, a New Age healer, is interrupted by two rogue cops looking for a laptop. Next thing you know, they're subdued by "a blonde with a gun." They're not heard from again, and the blonde remains shadowy. Then Nat picks up the phone and hears Annie's voice; evidently she'd faked her death to avoid SEC and IRS bloodhounds. The rest of the novel has Nat realizing, afterencountering her in the flesh, that Annie's much harder than he'd thought; proof comes during a showdown in Vegas (again, too little detail) as a conspiracy to entrap computer users goes down the tubes. Slight and unimaginativeAgent: Laurie Liss/Sterling Lord Literistic Inc.

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Hooked

Grand Central

Chapter One

I remember mostly details.

The extra foam sliding down the side of the mocha. A couple arguing over whether to put the "Mighty OJ" juicer on their bridal registry. The rottweiler tied outside the café, standing on hind legs, paws pressed urgently against the window.

When she walked by, I was reading a languid description of a Boston river, somewhat guiltily speeding through the imagery to get back to the book's action. I wouldn't have noticed her at all had she not put a small, folded square of paper on the corner of my table. I registered graceful hands, and a ring on the index finger. Then I focused on the piece of paper. Was I being picked up?

When I looked up again, she was nearly out the screen door, purposeful, and not stopping to look back. I dog-eared a page in my book, picked up the folded note, and followed her.

I scanned the street. The young transplants who call San Francisco's Marina District home meandered with designer sunglasses and designer baby strollers, enjoying a fogless July afternoon. Through the crowd, I could see she was halfway into a red Saab parked in front of the PitaParlor.

Something kept me from calling out. I figured I'd wave her down, but she was in the car and pulling away before I could get close enough to yell without making a scene. I looked at the textured beige stationery in my palm. I unfolded the corners, and saw words like a bullhorn:

"Get out of the café-NOW!"

The café exploded.

Smoke. Car alarms. Glass, ashes, a cloud of dust. A sound inside my head like a hangover delivered via freight train. I don't think I ever lost consciousness. The blast took me three feet through the air, dropped me on the pavement, but seemed to leave me intact.

I've seen footage of war zones, where the world seems to be coming undone. This was nothing like that-just a single moment of extraordinary violence, followed by haze. Like a bloody version of the time my father slammed a stainless steel pot on the kitchen floor to get my brother's attention.

The front window of the café was blown out, and a side wall was ripped, though not torn down, exposing metal and concrete innards. A couple wandered out from the screen door; he held an arm limply at his side, her bloody legs churned between step and stumble. The owner of the rottweiler checked his pet for wounds.

These days, you imagine the first thought at such a moment would be of terrorism.

My first thought was of Annie.

She was rarely far from my mind, even four years after the accident that took her life at the age of twenty-eight. Mostly, I'd thought of her at moments of transition-when I got up, climbed into bed, or on a long drive between interviews. It said as much about me as us; it was in those moments, the quiet instances when life lacked structure, that I most needed a place to focus.

I wouldn't defend my relationship with Annie as perfect, but it defined love for me, and endured. She was always chewing strong breath mints, causing our kisses to taste spicy, and I got sad when I smelled cinnamon. Sometimes at night, I told an imaginary Annie stories aloud and tried to guess at which point she would have sleepily asked me to wrap it up.

But it was more than longing that made me think of her as a thin layer of dust settled over me. It was the note I'd been handed. I'd know Annie's handwriting anywhere.

"Can you move your legs?"

The words came through my fog from a police officer, kneeling beside me. I waved my hand to say, "I'm fine." I started to stand, and he helped guide me up by the elbow.

"We need to get you out of this area."

As my awareness returned, so did the sounds and colors, and the chaos. Police and firefighters, the sound of radio chatter, helicopters. I was embedded in the evening news.

The officer led me toward an area apparently being set up for the wounded. Was I hurt worse than I thought?

"Mystic River," the police officer said.

I looked at him with confusion.

"Good book," he added. "But you really should invest in the hardback. It's a sign of a fully committed person."

I looked down and saw I still had the novel I'd been reading in the café. My white knuckles told me I'd been clutching it like a life preserver. The note. Where was it? I fished in my pockets, but came up empty. I turned around and headed back to where I'd been lifted off the ground.

"Hold on, pardner. We can't have you going back there. Too dangerous."

"I lost someone," I said.

"You lost someone?"

"Something. I lost something. Please."

"Well, you're not going back to get it now."

With a powerful hand on my shoulder, he turned me around, walked me down the block to a concrete patch cordoned off by yellow tape, and set me on the ground with the others.

The cop's name was Danny Weller, and he was a chatterer. He told me about growing up in Oakland, and learning to fish in waders in the Sacramento River with his father. His dad, he said, was a fierce wordsmith, the outer casing of a union man covering a dictionary. Danny stayed nearby-my personal caseworker.

He kept my state of mind numb, but his friendly rambling didn't slow the background din of questions. Who would do such a thing? Did someone try to save my life? Was that person connected to Annie?

And what happened to everyone else in the café? How many hurt? How many dead? Those questions I asked aloud.

"We have three fatalities and a couple people in critical," Danny said. "Not as miraculous as it first appeared."

"What do you mean?" I looked at a half dozen people sitting on the street around me, nursing various wounds. Each was attended by police and emergency medical personnel. The idea that anyone survived seemed miraculous.

"The explosion was confined to one area of the café-it's not as bad as we first thought," Danny said. "At this point, we don't know if it was intentional or an industrial accident."

"You mean it might not have been a bomb?"

"What makes you think it was a bomb?" Danny looked at me intently, with curiosity but not accusation.

I took him in for the first time. I noticed hair and gut; he had a lot of both. I figured him at around forty-five years old. Worn, blue-collar hands, no wedding ring, but that didn't mean anything anymore. He had soft, droopy eyes that reminded me somehow of the black and chocolate-brown-colored glass polar bear eyes from the taxidermist's office where I interned the summer before my senior year in college.

Before I could get out an answer to Danny's question, a paramedic knelt beside me.

"He seems okay," Danny said. "He was outside when it happened."

"Let's have a look," the paramedic said, tilting my chin up so I could look him in the eye. "I'm going to ask you some basic questions. Indulge me. What's your name?"

"Nathaniel. Nathaniel Idle."

"Nat Idle," Danny the cop said. I'd told him my first name earlier, but not my last.

The paramedic and I turned our heads to look. Danny turned his eyes to the side, the way a bad poker player fails to mask emotion, and I can't say I was surprised.

A year earlier, when I was researching an article about the HIV epidemic faced by the city's immigrant prostitution rings, I'd come across a disturbing tip. Several officers assigned to crack down on the residential brothels were sampling the fare rather than bringing the violators to justice. One of the cops, upon learning he might have contracted HIV himself, beat a twenty-year-old Malaysian prostitute with the battle end of a flashlight. The cop-Timothy Aravelo-and two colleagues were convicted.

Publicly, a number of police officers lauded my efforts. It was politically correct to do so. Privately, they said I had exaggerated the problems of one bad cop and his own domestic dispute and turned it into a crusade. I was viewed as a member of the corner-cutting sensationalist media.

"No obvious broken bones, a laceration on the forehead, scrapes to knees, elbows, and hands. Consistent with a forceful fall," the paramedic said.

"You did the right thing," Danny said.

The paramedic thought Danny was talking to him. I knew what he really meant.

"Thanks," I said. "Danny, look, something's not right. Something is very strange, and-"

Danny cut me off. "We're doing preliminary interviews with everyone who was in the area. We like to get impressions while they're fresh. You're our next contestant."

He pulled me up by the hand and bent in close. "Ordinarily, Lieutenant Aravelo would ask you a few gentle questions and then give you a pat on the back. But you might get slightly rougher treatment."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Hooked by Matt Richtel Copyright © 2007 by Matt Richtel. Excerpted by permission.
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