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    Digital Fortress: A Thriller
    Digital Fortress: A Thriller
    Digital Fortress: A Thriller
    Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

    Digital Fortress: A Thriller

    Written by Dan Brown

    Narrated by Bruce Sabath

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Before the multi-million, runaway bestseller The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown set his razor-sharp research and storytelling skills on the most powerful intelligence organization on earth--the National Security Agency (NSA)--in this thrilling novel, Digital Fortress.

    When the National Security Agency’s invincible code-breaking machine encounters a mysterious code it cannot break, the agency calls its head cryptographer, Susan Fletcher, a brilliant, beautiful mathematician. What she uncovers sends shock waves through the corridors of power. The NSA is being held hostage…not by guns or bombs but by a code so complex that if released would cripple U.S. intelligence.

    Caught in an accelerating tempest of secrecy and lies, Fletcher battles to save the agency she believes in. Betrayed on all sides, she finds herself fighting not only for her country but for her life. It is a battle for survival—a crucial bid to destroy a creation of inconceivable genius that threatens to obliterate the balance of world power…for all time.

    This edition of the book is the deluxe, tall rack mass market paperback.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateJan 1, 2004
    ISBN9781593973971
    Digital Fortress: A Thriller
    Author

    Dan Brown

    Dan Brown is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Origin, The Da Vinci Code, Digital Fortress, Deception Point, The Lost Symbol, Angels & Demons, and Inferno. He is a graduate of Amherst College and Phillips Exeter Academy, where he spent time as an English teacher before turning his efforts to writing full-time. He lives in New England with his wife. Visit his website at DanBrown.com.

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    Reviews for Digital Fortress

    3/5

    5,671 ratings150 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Easy read and I enjoyed the story, great adventure for the wknd
    • 3/5
      A simple thriller that is not Dan Brown.s calibre. Disappointing
    • 4/5
      Nothing was good you know... everything was just bull shit
    • 2/5
      Tempted to tag this as fantasy but I'll let it go. This book challenged my ability to suspend disbelief beyond its limit.
    • 2/5
      Awful, terrible, horrible writing. This felt like it was written by a AP English student instead of a worlds best seller. The character, Susan, is made to perform actions and say phases indicative of someone who’s IQ is just above disabled, despite being a top NSA agent. I wanted to quit listening at many points. I wish I would have. Also, the narrator has a lisp, which was hard to get used to.
    • 5/5
      The voices are so realistic, I like the drama. Bravo!
    • 2/5
      I just couldn't get into this one. There was so much focus on technology that it felt like the computer program was the main character instead of the people. I kept falling asleep.
    • 5/5
      This was great. I would rec this to anyone else!
    • 5/5
      Another gem from Dan Brown. I loved it. I was so invested in the characters.
    • 4/5
      I thought this book was great except for the ending. It managed to be simultaneously too obvious (I guessed it) and improbable (no one would ever do that). The cryptographic part of the denouement was not exciting, but the more active part of it was handled very well. I give it four stars because I'm a math dork, but, if I didn't already know cryptography, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much.
    • 5/5
      So good! I love reading books like these, and Dan Brown didn't disappoint with this book
    • 3/5
      I didn't find this as well written as The Da Vinci Code, but was still able to finish. It was an easy quick read, but the heroin was a bit weak to the point where she wasn't even a main character.
    • 2/5
      Easily the worst of Dan Brown's books. Basic scenario is quite interesting but the events described in a super code breaking agency become progressively less believable. Also some incredible things have to be accepted just to serve the plot, eg that the brilliant female protagonist would not have spotted a very obvious anagram. The end is a mess.
    • 5/5
      This was my fisrst and still best Brown book
      I kinda liked it becouse i consider myslef ICT educated guy
      the thing that really got me here are codes and i jsut cannot stop reading

      I Really liked it and i recommend for evry ICT guy to read
    • 3/5
      Gripping, though in the Dan brown formula. (See my review on [book: Deception Point] for my thoughts on that.)
    • 3/5
      I’m not a diehard Dan Brown fan. I do, however, enjoy his books because they’re fast, exciting reads with a lot of action and conspiracies or puzzles to figure out. When I need a quick read (in terms of pace and time it takes me to read one), Brown has what I’m looking for. That being said, had Sweetbeeps not finished this recently and recommend it, when it came up on my TBR Tear Down list, I would have immediately marked it as unread and moved on.Digital Fortress, while set before cell phones (there are pagers, heehee) and Wi-Fi and much of the tech we know today (just so you know, I do recall dial-up internet, AOL chatrooms and clunky cellphones that could only make calls), is not jarringly out of date. As it focuses mainly on the government’s capabilities to read emails and listen to calls made by the general public (hmm…) and the main focus is decryption, it feels very relevant. I’m not big on cryptology so I didn’t find those segments particularly interesting, but if you enjoy that sort of thing, I think there’s plenty in the book to keep you guessing. The latter portion of the book is actually dedicated to cracking a code and I assume it’s possible for someone to attempt it without the help of the characters if they desired (I didn’t.)There’s also some espionage going on – while David hunts through Madrid for a ring, there’s someone hot on his heels. David has rather a lot of luck in some far-fetched situations, but I was also raving about what a friggen idiot he was often enough for his efforts to seem realistic. Most of the action scenes in the book center around David and, like many movies, they were slightly unbelievable but relatively fun to imagine.In general, the characters fell flat for me. David is a “good guy” and Susan is a “smart woman” but I didn’t particularly like them – I didn’t dislike them either. Though, I do think that for all Susan’s smarts, she ends up helpless in most situations and I wish she’d had a bit more autonomy. Perhaps that’s just a product of when it was written, or maybe that’s how Brown usually writes his ladies – it’s been too long since I read Angels & Demons or the Da Vinci Code for me too remember. I wouldn’t classify it as problematic or anything, just annoying.Another thing that irked me was Brown’s character descriptions. For those of you who may think I’m overly harsh when I constantly criticize YA for giving me a full (and typically awkward and unnatural) physical rundown of the heroes and heroines, let me say I realize other genres do it too. Brown is guilty of giving full-fledged character descriptions in ways that took me right out of the story – and for details that I consider useless. This is obviously a personal preference, but I don’t usually need to know the hair and eye color of a character unless it’s particularly unusual (and no, sapphire blue eyes and fiery red locks isn’t what I mean) or it plays into the story somehow. I felt like Brown had to make sure we knew that David and Susan were fit and good looking and it drove me nuts.Here’s Susan (from the point of a view of a random guard whose perspective we never get again and doesn’t play into the story in any way – he’s straight-up ogling her as she walks by): “He noticed that her strong hazel eyes seemed distant today, but her cheeks had a flushed freshness, and her shoulder-length, auburn hair looked newly blown dry. Tailing her was the faint scent of Johnson’s Baby Powder. His eyes fell the length of her slender torso – to her white blouse with the bra barely visible beneath, to her knee-length khaki skirt, and finally to her legs…Susan Fletcher’s legs. Hard to imagine they support a 170 IQ, he mused to himself.”And later, from David’s perspective: “If Susan’s body had been lanky and awkward as a teenager, it sure wasn’t now. Somewhere along the way, she had developed a willowy grace – slender and tall with full, firm breasts and a perfectly flat abdomen. David often joked that she was the first swimsuit model he’d ever met with a doctorate in applied mathematics and number theory.”UGH.Actually, the more I think of it, the more these descriptions bother me (omg, am I becoming woke?) Susan is really the only female of note in the book (aside from one other who is viewed as a grudge-bearing harpy until the end) and she’s only viewed through the eyes of the men around her. (Side note: There’s an especially uncomfortable bit where her father-figure boss has some incredibly creepy thoughts about her, but I don’t even feel like going into all that.) I notice that Brown does throw in a bit about how smart she is at the end of each so we don’t forget to value her brains. But really, are her firm breasts in any way pertinent to the story?! (Sweetbeeps laughingly said yes when I exclaimed this out loud after reading the above quote.) Model body aside, even if Brown felt it was absolutely necessary to give us all Susan’s physical stats, did we need them all at once? Could her hair have been mentioned at a different time than her eyes and legs? She might as well have stood in front of a mirror and described herself (a trait my much younger self was guilty of doing in every story she wrote.)Not that Susan isn’t guilty of ogling David; and while it’s no less annoying, it is less sexualized: “Becker was dark – a rugged, youthful thirty-five with sharp green eyes and a wit to match. His strong jaw and taut features reminded Susan of carved marble. Over six feet tall, Becker moved across a squash court faster than any of his colleagues could comprehend. After soundly beating his opponent, he would cool off by dousing his head in a drinking fountain and soaking his tuft of thick, black hair.”At least she didn’t talk about the size of his bulge or his tight ass. She does lose points for the marble carving cliché though.Then we have one of the side characters, as viewed by the narrator, and boy do they want to make sure we know he’s ugly: “Jabba resembled a giant tadpole. Like the cinematic creature for whom he was nicknamed, the man was a hairless spheroid.”Are you serious!? I feel like I’m literally supposed to picture Jabba the Hut, but on two legs and covered in flesh, with a human face. Cut the crap, Dan Brown.Fortunately, stupid descriptions like these are few and far between. Despite my hang-ups, the plot was fast-paced and kept me reading. I finished the book in two days and while my overall feelings are pretty meh, I think this would be a good beach or vacation read. I’m not sure I’ll pick up another Dan Brown book in the future though.
    • 3/5
      While mildly entertaining as an audiobook on a road trip, I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone who expects it to be more than that. There’s a little too much suspension of disbelief asked of the reader, if you know anything at all about cryptography or software in general. The plot “twists” are also entirely foreseeable.

      If you can look past all that, go ahead and give it a read.
    • 2/5
      Awful. Just completely unbelievable situations and events, and not exciting ones either.
    • 2/5
      Brown is just okay. This one in particular is not one of my favorites. His heroine is ostensibly strong, but has a few too many moments of helplessness..."Everything Susan had ever learned about self-defense was suddenly racing through her mind. She tried to fight, but her body did not respond. She was numb. She closed her eyes..." I was glad to have closed my eyes on this one.
    • 5/5
      Social engineering in action!

      There’s no better example than hacking dNSA!
    • 2/5
      Utter garbage. If it wasn’t because I listen to the “372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back” podcast I would have bailed on it ages ago. The writing was just horrendous. And the climax was a complete cop out.
    • 1/5
      Toxic waste! Avoid if possible. Clunky plot and bad 'twists'
    • 5/5
      What can I expect from Dan Brown than a page-turner masterpiece? I admit that I didn't like Origin all that much, but Digital Fortress rocked! 


      Right from the beginning, the suspense was thick. From David getting shipped all the way to Spain, to the Digital Fortress, the air was thick with suspense. 


      Though there was no Mr. Micky Mouse...Er, I mean Robert Langdon in this one, Susan Fletcher was a really awesome character too. But I liked David Becker the most. Because he was so out of his comfort zone and yet he managed to succeed at every point, up until escaping from his killer. 


      I read Digital Fortress in two sittings. The first time, I hadn't been all that interested. But then the second time I just couldn't let go, and I spent almost all day reading it, and finally finished it. 


      I loved trying to figure out who the culprit might be. Unlike murder mysteries, here, I had to wonder who would want Digital Fortress the most. And when I finally did realize who it was, I was shell-shocked. 


      Digital Fortress was adventurous, full of suspense and an exciting read! I'd definitely recommend you to read it!
    • 4/5
      Good easy read about technology of the past.
    • 2/5
      No real understanding of modern cryptography rather focus on brute force attacks. Page turning thriller like many of his more famous books.
    • 4/5
      READ IN DUTCH

      I believe people say this is Dan Brown's weakest book? I beg to differ. I quite liked this one, or at least the subject it was about. And I think now with all the commotion on the NSA and Snowden, it's again a hot topic. How much privacy should we give up in order to achieve safety? What is this safety?



      Perfectly in Dan Brown style, there is a lot of running, shooting, (almost) killing, etc. I never really like too much of those things in my books, because it tends to become predictable very fast. Still, I've eventually read the first five Dan Brown novels, because people kept asking me whether I had already read them.
    • 1/5
      I did not Finnish this book I got about 9% before I finally gave up on it. I wanted to like it but I just couldn't find anything I enjoyed about what I read. being a bit of a geek I was interested in the cryptography aspect. sadly I moved on to another book on my kindle.
    • 4/5
      As others have written here, Digital Fortress is silly. The plot is not believable. The puzzles are not so puzzling. The characters alternate between incredible naivety/blissful ignorance and superhero. That said, I enjoyed Brown's book. Like good science fiction, once you accept the underlying premise, the book is a good read.
    • 1/5
      Picked this off my shelf yesterday morning, 'cause I was kind of in the mood for a dumb, light thriller. And I had recently read a review where someone had said that they had "learned a lot" about Internet privacy and cryptography from the book. So, even though I hadn't really liked Brown's 2 other novels, I figured I'd give it a go.

      Well, it was dumb.
      You one thing that always annoys me? When an author goes out of his way to tell you that his heroes are gorgeous, fit/muscular, and at a genius-level of intellectual brilliance - but then they don't do anything to prove it.
      Another thing that annoys me? Boring, unresearched stereotypes. In this book, it's the people of Spain (in general), and punk rockers. The punks were so bad I was actually laughing. It was worse than sitcoms from the 80's where it was trendy to have an episode featuring those stupid, dangerous, drug-using punks for a while. Seriously.
      Oh, and there's nothing about codes or security in it that the average Internet user or person who read a book on codes as a kid doesn't know. If you have no idea what PGP is AT ALL, go for it.
      There's also a bunch of total crapola about how the government NEEDS to be able to read everyone's e-mail to defeat all the insidious plots against us, and snide comments about how silly it is that housewives are worried about the government stealing their top-secret recipes. And references to civil rights activists as "fanatics." Rather offensive, really.
      To give it its fair due, the denouement was fairly exciting.
      But if you're interested in finding out about computer security, read Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon." Now that's a good book.
    • 5/5
      Early Dan Brown, before Robert Langdon, but just as good. The main characters in this book are David Becker, professor of foreign language at Georgetown University (model for Robert Langdon?), and Susan Fletcher, brilliant and beautiful head cryptographer at the NSA and fiancé of David. The plot revolves around a presumably unbreakable code that was going to be released to the public free of charge, essentially putting the National Security Agency out of business as any message could be sent in the open without fear of being translated. David Becker goes to Seville, Spain, to try and track down the man who wrote the code to find the kill phrase while Susan works at her end to try and break the copy of the code the NSA received. This book has the same action, tension, history, geography and architecture and plot twists as I have come to expect (and enjoy) from Dan Brown. Also, there is just enough about cryptography to satisfy a math geek like me. I thoroughly enjoyed this book!