Black Nowhere by Reece Hirsch

When CaptainMal promises users of his dark web site called Kyte an adventure, little does he know exactly how out of control things will get. Initially intended as a way for any free trade to occur beyond the oversight of government regulation, Kyte quickly turns into the go-to place for anonymous online illegal drug selling/buying.

In only a matter of weeks, Kyte is doing a million dollars a day in transactions, and as proceeds continue to grow exponentially, the site is quickly on track to become a multi-billion dollar a year platform.

Unfortunately for the site’s founder, Nate Fallon, aka CaptainMal, Kyte’s meteoric rise catches the eyes of the wrong people on both sides of the law. The notoriously ruthless Zeta cartel sees Kyte as a threat to their real-world sales—why leave the house to score drugs when you can have them delivered anonymously to your door?—and FBI Special Agent Lisa Tanchik, a specialist in cybercrime and the dark web, also takes note of the fast-growing site and brings it to the attention of her superiors.

An inter-agency task force is formed, and a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse is soon afoot between Fallon and Tanchik, as played out on the Dark Web by their cyber alter egos, with Fallon/CaptainMal trying to stay ahead of both the FBI and the Zeta cartel long enough to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

Black Nowhere, the first entry in a new series that will be built around Agent Lisa Tanchik, finds author Reece Hirsch in fine form and firing on all cylinders. Inspired by the real-life events surrounding the Dark Web site Silk Road and its founder Ross Ulbricht, Black Nowhere is a marvelous mix of old-school police procedural and cutting-edge cyber thriller.

Agent Tanchik is unquestionably new-school savvy in her understanding of the dark web and use of multiple online personas to worm her way deep into the cyber underground in pursuit of her quarry, and the technology involved in both the creation of Kyte and Tanchik’s hunt for its founder is quite sophisticated.

Yet Hirsch, an attorney who co-chairs the privacy-and-cybersecurity section of the international law firm in which he is a partner, presents the online/dark web technology in such a way that, even if you’re not overly tech savvy, you can still easily follow what’s going on.

And despite all her new-school savvy, Agent Tanchik is not merely a keyboard warrior. She’s more than willing to put on some body armor and go on a raid with the SWAT team, tail a suspect down dark streets, or even throw a few punches if push comes to shove…which it decidedly does.

And it’s somewhere in the middle, that place where old school and new school meet, that Black Nowhere catches fire and will have you burning the midnight oil to find out how things unfold.

Black Nowhere is available from Thomas & Mercer.