Zero Day-S. Hussain Zaidi

Book: Zero Day
Author: S. Hussain Zaidi
Publisher: HarperCollins India

What if all the traffic signals across the city stop working?

Zero Day by S. Hussain Zaidi starts on a day when Mumbai is in a state of chaos and all traffic signals across the entire city have stopped working. Shahwaz Ali Mirza, head of the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad, receives an anonymous email claiming it to be a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. He quickly puts together a crack team that includes his protege, IG Cybercrime Vikrant Singh, and gets to work trawling the dark web for more information on this mystery attack. However, a move to bring forward the hacker backfires, leading to a second, deadlier attack on Mumbai's lifeline, the railway system. It is their first brush with cyberterrorism: a zero-day vulnerability in the Indian government's system that could bring the country to its knees. Racing against time and investigating a case unlike any other, in Zero Day, Mirza and Vikrant face the most dangerous mission of their lives.

The book is an interesting read because the book explores an idea that is quite new and a crime that is a bit different from the usual ones we come across in books and stories. The plot starts off on a good note and it kicks off in the highest gear. The storytelling is imaginative, and Zaidi uses the idea of DDoS and plugs in age-old border disputes to up the ante. Another interesting thing about the book is that the technical details are just enough to set up the plot, but not enough to bore the reader. The idea of a cyber attack in the maximum city is a true nightmare, and Zaidi just brings it too alive with the concepts of botnets and darkweb. There are sub plots which are in play, and I liked how they keep the story alive. The things that didn’t work for me was that the second half of the book seems too simple and moved quite faster as compared to the first half. I would have loved a bit more build up before the reveal. The climax is well planned and closes the story beautifully.

The characters that form a part of the story are quite interesting as well and I liked how each of them have been given specific roles in the story. Another interesting aspect of the character development is that the detailing is something that Zaidi has focused upon and there are minute details that make an impact later in the story.

Overall, Zero Day is a book that I would recommend to anyone who loves a technology-driven crime story. The book scores a 4.69/5 for me.

This review is powered by the Blogchatter Review Program, and I was provided a media copy in exchange of an honest review.

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