Spyder Web

The sizzle of a good thriller is missing from this originally self-published debut, even though Grace fuses brawny action-hero derring-do with brainy computer hacking. After one final mission of government-sanctioned vengeance, Navy SEAL Nolan Kilkenny, who lives in Ann Arbor, Mich., is eager to get to work for his father's pet project, an online research clearinghouse called MARC (Michigan Applied Research Consortium). Meanwhile, thanks to a financially vulnerable CIA agent, data thieves Alex Roe and Ian Parnell have gotten their hands on Spyder, a CIA prototype of the ultimate hacking program--and they've chosen MARC's mainframe as their test target. Naturally, Kilkenny discovers the theft, and his SEAL talents are called upon to ward off worldwide technological disaster. Despite Grace's use of seemingly every thriller component in the business--Asian killers, Navy SEALs, KGB defectors, high-tech pirates--in scenes that take the reader from Ann Arbor to Puerto Rico, Haiti and London, this novel is curiously devoid of thrills. The SEAL action scenes read like a Muzak version of Richard Marcinko's. The language is jargon-larded without actually explaining the technology. The plot is promising, but Grace's pacing impedes it. By cutting back and forth among the main players, he succeeds not in ratcheting up suspense but only in fracturing a reader's attention. Agent, Esther Margolis. (Jan.)