He is flown to the Netherlands and promptly becomes the prime suspect due to his past. Meanwhile in Berlin, the Interior Ministry begins to believe the blackouts may be due to terrorism and launches an investigation as Nuclear Plants begin to be hacked In Paris American CNN Reporter Lauren Shannon smells a major story as the blackouts spread across Europe and convinces her bureau chief to allow her to go to the Hague to investigate. He is called into the office to investigate the attack on the grid. In the Netherlands Europol Commissioner François Bollard is trying to catch a flight with his family to visit his parents in Paris but the grid outages have caused flights to be cancelled. His neighbor's daughter Lara works for the EU and is on Holiday in the nearby Austrian Alps. In Milan, former hackivist Pietro Manzano sees a pattern and believes the Electric grid is under assault by hackers. EU authorities in Brussels scramble to discover the cause. Starting in Italy, moving to Austria, then Germany then France, millions are left without power. It start's out with seemingly unrelated blackouts across the European Union Powergrid. This translation is pretty good but the story skips around quite a bit and is sometimes hard to keep up with. Mark Elsberg's thriller was a best seller in Germany a couple of years ago.

And it made me want to get off the grid and get a generator! Scary scenario about which everyone should be aware. But I am keeping this one because it educated me a lot and I want to keep all this information. Normally I share my books with our neighborhood Little Library after I finish them. I was fascinated, intrigued, and horrified. But for me the plot of this book is just a vehicle to explain the vulnerabilities of the world's electrical grid and how the electrical supply actually works around the world. The book also jumps around in geographic location as each part of the world is affected, so it takes awhile to remember where the characters live and what they do. The characters are rather stereotypical-the good guy hacker who determines how to get the grid back up and running. The weakness in the book is the fictional story. Once is the technical, governmental, and social descriptions which are perfectly written. The reason I gave this book 4 stars instead of 5 is that, while it is an excellent read, there are two types of writing styles. The scenario of terrorists attacking the world's power grid is in the realm of possibility and the aftermath of such an electrical collapse is powerful.

Black out elsberg