Lights Out

SNAP Agency, Book 1

By: Natalie Walters

Narrated by: Morgan Hallett

Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins

Publisher's summary

CIA analyst Brynn Taylor developed a new program to combat terrorism, and she invited members of foreign intelligence agencies to America to foster cooperation between countries. Now one of them, Egyptian spy Remon Riad, is missing.

Jack Hudson has been working for the Strategic Neutralization and Protection Agency for almost nine years and takes the lead in hunting down the missing spy. But he isn’t at all pleased to find out Brynn is involved. It’s hard to trust a woman who’s already betrayed you. Every lead they follow draws them dangerously deeper into an international plot. Kidnapping, murder, explosions, poisoning — the terrorists will do anything to accomplish their goal of causing a digital blackout that will blind a strategic US military communications center and throw the world into chaos.

Can Brynn surrender control to a man who doesn’t trust her? And can Jack ever get over what she did to him? The fate of the world — and their hearts — hangs in the balance.

©2021 Natalie Walters (P)2021 Recorded Books

Totally seemed real

I loved that it never slowed or got stuck on anything that was filler.It was believable and so possible and it allows you to feel like you are there just watching.I most definitely recommend this one and I’m on to book two…..Hang on for the ride ‼️
Narrator was great!!
J P

Amazing!

Intelligent, suspenseful and romantic! A thrilling book to loose yourself in for a few days.

Excellent

First book of Natalie Walters that I have read. Fast paced and entertaining. Will definitely listen to more. Narrator was very good and didn't distract from the story.

Good plot

I really enjoyed the first half but the second half got a little repetitive and a bit too sappy for me.

Great Characters!

The narrator did a great job, which made this enjoyable to listen to. The characters were very interesting and likable and their interactions along with the story made this time well spent !

I Wanted To Love This Book! But I Was Dissapointed

I understand why some reviewers like this book so much. But I couldn’t overlook its serious flaws.

Advice to readers: Try to read this book in one sitting–partly because the suspense could interfere with your other activities, but also because you’ll need to keep track of lots of characters. Don’t count on learning anything from this book–anything you think you learn about cyber warfare is probably wrong.

What I liked: The characters–and their interactions–were interesting. The plot was clever and engaging. The basics of the plot, and the concept of the SNAP agency, were believable. .

What I didn’t like: There were too many characters. I had a hard time keeping track of them all. And because there were so many of them, none of them got the development I thought they deserved.
The writing was not well edited. Over use of some words drove me crazy. Brow and Fulcrum to name 2

The computer-related details were wrong. I’m not talking about a mistake here and there. Just about every depiction of computers, viruses, and cyber warfare was wildly off base. The mistakes are not incidental to the plot, either; cyber warfare is the whole theme of the story. To offer just one example, a character is described as holding a “zip drive.” (For those who don’t remember, Zip drives hold Zip disks, which were sort of a super floppy disk which went out of style in the early 2000’s. I suspect the author meant “flash drive,” but given how wrong the other computer details were, it’s hard to be sure.) Here’s another example: as Kekoa tries to decrypt a laptop, someone goes in “scrubs” the computer. Rule #1 of computer forensics is that you make a copy of any digital media you’re trying to decode. Rule #2 is that you do any such analysis in an airgapped environment, where no internet access is possible. So Kekoa comes across as being an incompetent wanna-be computer investigator.

Some other flubbed details were also distracting. For example, a military command center should have been posted as a no-salute zone. Characters were described as using cell phones inside a military command center (which is terrible on at least two levels: phones are prohibited in such places, and the center would have been shielded so no signal could have gotten in or out). In one of the subplots, 1400 pounds of fertilizer was discussed as having comparable explosive potential as the explosion in Beirut, which involved 2 MILLION pounds of fertilizer.

The characters all operated on an extremely emotional level, always overly impulsive and romantic.
Morgan Hallett was good with the delivery of the story