Daniel Suarez, "Daemon"

Daemon hovers on the edge of being science fiction, as it is so contemporary.  This is a problem to the narrative in my opinion because it makes it harder to suspend your disbelief.
First the good parts.  Daemon is a bit of a page turner.  I had not a speck trouble getting through it at all and enjoyed the read.  Suarez writes very well, and the techno geekery of the novel appealed to me.  What is wrong with the book is more difficult to explain, as I think it really comes down to what is wrong with the book in a technical sense, rather than in literary sense.  This is precisely why it being contemporary and not more SF in feel is what stops it from working for me.
Basically he posits the ability to leave programs waiting on machines to carry out instructions when they get triggered.  All to the good.  That is the daemon and it gets its name from processes that run continuously in the background on computers monitoring for events before doing something.  In the case of the Daemon of Suarez's book it is murder, at least initially.  This part is fun, and in fact plausible.  The problem with the idea is that it keeps going on and acting and disobeys one of the laws of the universe.  Which is that if you engineer something to do something, even something simple, it probably will not work.  In reality, you have to test things, tinker with things, change things to get them to work.  It requires intelligence.  Suarez has a computer program without intelligence doing things without being tested.  It just simply defies belief.

In that way this book is a thriller, even though at first glance it looks more like near future sci fi.  Thrillers always it seems have to take a step beyond plausible into the realms of the ridiculous.  And unlike SF they cannot posit something new to explain it and allow the reader to suspend their disbelief.  I would reccomend it to people who love thrillers though!

(Suggested reading by my friend Dale, who I have not seen in years, thanks Dale.)