Review by Booklist Review
Ruth is used to packing up quickly and not looking back. As a cybercriminal specializing in bank fraud, she has to be. Ruth is a brilliant and morally ambiguous hacker and usually works alone. But her last heist included some assistance from a seemingly trustworthy accomplice whom Ruth discovers has been siphoning money from a shared account. As federal agents get closer to uncovering the very lucrative and very illegal digital web Ruth's been weaving, she has to, like so many times before, move quickly and leave any loyalties behind. Kaufman immediately sets readers into Ruth's high-stakes world as a modern outlaw. Ruth chooses to move along the fringes of society, building massive amounts of wealth while staying undercover. Skillfully mixing intrigue, technology, and sharp psychological insight, Ruth Run is a nuanced portrayal of a brash antihero and the federal agent who's had his eye on her for years. Readers who loved The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo will enjoy the tech-savvy protagonists, madcap circumstances, and ethical dilemmas in this fresh addition to the genre, a debut thriller in which every character's motives and methods are equally up for debate.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Kaufman debuts with an irresistible cat-and-mouse thriller about a cybercriminal and her stalker. Ruth, 26, has created a microchip that allows her to skim money from banks, but when her theft is detected by a government organization known only as the Agency, she's forced to leave her quaint San Francisco apartment and go on the run. In a parallel narrative from the perspective of Mike, the agent who flagged Ruth's illicit activity, the reader learns the pair met several years earlier as colleagues at a tech company. Mike's been stalking her ever since, fantasizing about their life together even as he pursues her on behalf of the government. Out on the road, Ruth meets an eccentric cast of characters, including a truck driver who's running bombs for a domestic terror organization and an honest bachelor on a religious homestead. Kaufman's plucky heroine and slimy villain are both perfectly drawn, and the pedal-to-the-medal pacing never lets up. This is impossible to put down. Agent: Nicol Aragi, Aragi Inc. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Readers are asked to root for an unrepentant thief in this first novel, a jokey cybercrime thriller. Ruth, a hacker of microchips, would say that she isn't theworst kind of thief: "I skimmed chump change from banks. Are you really going to side with a bank?" Mike, formerly a salesman who worked with Ruth and now a clock puncher for what he calls "the Agency," has spent seven years on Ruth's trail. At some point during the car chase that brings Ruth and her nearly 3 pounds of stolen cash from Northern California to Nevada and beyond, she learns that she's being framed in the double murder of her coding assistant and his boyfriend. Ruth and Mike's cat-and-mouse act has an odd, couplelike tetchiness: Ruth considers Mike "a self-important jerk" and "a government flunky"; Mike sees Ruth as "an almost pathologically nonconformist spirit" who "dressed badly" and who, for all the good trying to elude him will do her, "might as well have tried to hide from the sky." Cat and mouse take turns narrating this cunning and constantly surprising novel, giving readers a passenger-seat view from which to witness each adversary's missteps and monitor their weaknesses. (Ruth's kryptonite: food and the dog she picks up on the road. Mike's kryptonite: Ruth.) Luddite readers will miss some of the novel's finer points, but underneath all its talk of microchips, databases, and firewalls is a character-fueled story in which a bit of heart occasionally seeps out from between the cracks in Ruth's armor, or at least tries to: "I reminded myself that life was about more than money; what money could buy also mattered." No tech expertise required to enjoy this diverting and funny-as-hell cyber caper. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
