I have known Deb Radcliff as a B2B journalist colleague and now cyber fiction author for more than a decade. Her latest novel in the “Breaking Backbones” series can be read independent of the first volume, and is a sizzler taken directly from today’s cybersecurity news. We have mostly the same motley cast of characters of hackers, ne’er-do-wells, and tough dudes who are trying to mess up the world now that its central IT authority GlobeCom was taken down at the end of the first book. The various hacker clans are trying desperately to free a bunch of imprisoned programmers somewhere in Russia and stop the evil doers from unleashing their AI-based code on the world. In the meantime, there are plenty of drone attacks to manage, code to review, and personal scores to be settled. There is plenty of dystopia to be served up in its pages, and a great deal of verisimilitude thanks to Radcliff’s familiarity with the subject matter. Will her world be successful at freeing its digital enslavement from a crazy autocrat? Well, I won’t give away the ending, but it sure was fun reading about it.