Banking and hacking collide in Chicago. Told in present tense, this is the story of a young man who takes risks on the way up the corporate ladder and then finds something worse than he could have expected. Huxley's friend tells an executive that AlphaBanc's activities are beyond the pale and takes a tumble from a high window. Accessing comprehensive records on clients, from medical to social security, drivers, financial, marital, criminal, phone call listings, video clips, facial recognition software, had seemed like fun. Now Huxley's scared....

In GLASS HOUSE 51 Clayborne wears a two hundred dollar tie to a teleconference, while snug in a hideaway a computer hacker named Norman Dunne is meeting women on line - women who end up dead. His nickname is the Gnome. Meanwhile other hackers have wormed their way into the air traffic control system at O'Hare airport. The Gnome knows who they are, and pulls a sick stunt to deter them from such activity.

Christin is a girl in Alphabanc who considers banking jocks beneath her notice, especially since she overheard that there was a pot of a thousand dollars for the first guy who could get her in bed. She decides to sign up for a hot online dating site.

Since this is slightly in the future, I was surprised that a cellphone is still in danger by being dropped in the bath: waterproof ones already exist. People pop Deludamil tranquilisers and let computers run their lives, their jobs coming down to making data entries. A large number of characters are thrown at us in the first few chapters, and it's hard to keep switching and remembering what job and dilemma went with which person. The Data Protection laws restrict holding so much information on people and the

implication is that the banks are ignoring them. The data in the story is physically stored on supercomputers in a underground data facility in Wisconsin, which generate so much heat that chimneys have to vent the steam. The history of hacking and routes it has taken are described, and the Gnome as a former AlphaBanc employee can hack the bank anytime, while malicious hackers plan anarchy. RFID tags in everything are scanned and linked to everyone, from passports to t-shirt purchases by cards, and every phone call and mail is subject to state eavesdropping; all as predicted by SF writers for fifty years.

If you don't like being spied upon, use cash and write letters, is my advice. GLASS HOUSE 51 by John Hampel is not easily readable to non-SF fans and those not into information technology overload may switch off partway, but for anyone interested it's an absorbing and worrying read.