There's a lot going on in the new stand-alone novel from the author of the Jack Swyteck novels. A big-name theatrical director wants to put on Kate Gamble's play, which is inspired, obliquely, by her father and his work in the tech industry. An old friend who works for Kate's father has disappeared on a corporate retreat. Kate's mother recently killed herself, leaving behind a note that said, "I did it for Kate." Grippando masterfully weaves the various plot threads together, revealing unexpected connections until the reader's ability to keep the subplots straight is pushed to the edge--but never over the edge: this is an ambitious thriller that asks the reader to follow a complex story and delivers a deeply satisfying conclusion. Grippando's biggest strength has always been his ability to create characters who feel as real as people we might meet on the street, the kind of people we worry about and share in their triumphs. Code 6 features some of Grippando's most compelling characters and one of his most intriguing stories.

At the start of this uneven standalone from bestseller Grippando (the Jack Swyteck series), Kate Gamble, an American University law student and would-be playwright, arrives at her parents' penthouse apartment in Tysons Corner, Va., to find that her mother, Elizabeth, apparently just jumped to her death from its balcony. A note Elizabeth left behind apologizes to her husband and adds that she "did it for Kate." Seeking to move on with her life, Kate accepts an internship at her father's company, Buck Technologies International, a private data-integration firm serving "virtually every counterterrorism organization in the Western World"; she also works on a play about how IBM enabled the Nazis to use data from punch cards to track down Jews. Kate stumbles upon a secret at Buck Technologies that threatens the life of an employee she used to babysit for and places her in an awkward position when the Justice Department conducts a security audit of the company, headed by an old boyfriend. Thoughtful and plausible speculations about how big tech could become even more intrusive and a sympathetic, capable heroine make up only in part for plot contrivances and formulaic action sequences. Grippando's execution falls short of his ambitions. Agent: Richard Pine, InkWell Management. (Jan.}}

An aspiring playwright's plan to base her first production on the secrets kept by her father's powerful IT firm unleashes a Pandora's box of demons. Buck Technologies International counts among its clients the Pentagon and the CIA. Kate Gamble, the daughter of CEO Christian Gamble, knows a little and suspects more about the legacy of its surveillance technology. Still grieving the suicide two years ago of her alcoholic mother, Elizabeth, she takes time from her studies in law school to draft a play about the history of Hollerith machines, primitive computers first deployed in the 1890 U.S. census and used by the Third Reich to track information about its Jewish residents and keep the concentration camps running in good order. While she's hunkering down to the first of many rewrites demanded by Broadway director Irving Bass, who's interested in the material despite its historical sprawl, more disturbing developments await her extended family. Kate's ex Noah Dunn, a senior cybercrimes prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C., expresses renewed interest in Christian Gamble's relationship with Sandra Levy, a "trusted advisor" who's doing time for corporate espionage. And the Chinese government, which paid Levy and her highly placed accomplice for Buck Technologies secrets they didn't deliver, plucks Patrick Battle, an up-and-coming Buck employee Kate used to babysit, from a corporate survival exercise in Colombia and uses him as a hostage to extort the particulars of Code 6, an undetectable data scraping tool, from Christian Gamble and Jeremy Peel, the chairman of the board who's trying to push him out and take his place. None of these 12-cylinder adventures do justice to the paranoid premise. High-stakes espionage, family drama, double crosses, noble gestures: For better or worse, it's all here. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Playwright Kate Gamble has made an enemy of her father with a play about the shadier side of the data integration company SF-Technologies, of which he is CEO. Then she's contacted by a former boyfriend, who's prosecuting a case against SF-Technologies. Expect combustion of all sorts from the New York Times best-selling Grippando; with a 40,000-copy first printing.