Window of Fear
As a victim of identity theft, crime author JEFFREY DEAVER felt well-placed to write a novel about the subject.
Anne Sexton, 26 Aug 2008
About four years ago, best-selling author Jeffrey Deaver was the victim of identity theft. The thieves bought around $3,000 worth of goods in his name, but they gave Deaver something much more valuable – the idea for a uniquely modern and sinister baddie. The result is The Broken Window, the latest book in his best-selling Lincoln Rhyme series.
“I never write about personal experiences,” says Deaver, “But I thought if I could extrapolate what had happened to me, so that the villain was not simply stealing money but was killing people and blaming innocent individuals for the crime, what a great villain that would be.”
Deaver’s research on identity theft lead him into the somewhat unnerving world of data mining – the companies that collect and collate personal information. In the novel, SSD, a data mining corporation that knows everything about you – how much wine you drank last week, how often you cheat on your partner and how much those new shoes really cost – becomes the second villain, allowing Deaver to create an immediate sense of peril as the killer targets various unsuspecting victims, but also a more diffuse, perhaps scarier, threat that there is nothing private about your private life anymore.
"I liked the idea of an over-arching sense of threat that would reach into everybody’s life, and I think what makes the killer scary is his modus operandi – the data that’s available on all of us.”
Reports of lost, stolen or misdirected data are common enough here, in the UK and the States. Most of the time the victims of lost data suffer no ill-effects, other than inconvenience, such as having to change their credit cards, but as Deaver points out, mined data has been used to commit violent crimes.
“Children have been kidnapped and people have been stalked. In the States, there was a woman who had a restraining order against her former partner. She changed her identity and moved, but her ex tracked her down through data mined information and she was killed. Thankfully, instances of these things happening are quite rare.”
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