Interrupt

Readers keen on the latest phone technology may enjoy this tech-based thriller; those wanting plot, pacing and three-dimensional characters may hang up early on. Protagonist Andy Faulkner is a a young design engineer for AT&T in Silicon Valley who, in neatly symbolic irony, is the divorced father of a deaf 11-year-old boy. Andy tries to appease the memory of his bullying, bridge-building father and (another neat symbol) fights acrophobia. He is chagrined when the failures of two vaunted new systems are tied to calls on his own phone, and humiliated when the telco's security chief fires him. Of course Andy sets out to find the villain. The mysterious terrorist, dubbed Interrupt, triggers more temporary system failures, kills a woman technician and ends up kidnapping Andy's son as part of an extortion plot against AT&T. Much of the narrative is related in techie-talk (``source code and object code''), which sometimes sounds like baby talk (``A crosspoint was the place in a switching network where two communications channels intersected''). Too much action takes place offstage--including the final resolution. The novel's biggest failure is the Interrupt's hokey motive--hardly a live wire on which to base a tale. (Feb.)