JEN YATES

Jen Yates is the CEO and co-founder of Technical Access Group.

That is a private organization working under contract licenses with the American government. Its initial and primary role is "clandestine intelligence acquisition" using computer hacking skills to break into remote servers belonging to people and organizations targeted by their clients and stealing highly sensitive information without the hacked being aware of the intrusion.

Recently, though, it has moved into the lesser known and far more hush-hush field of Cyber-Kinetic Eliminations - a euphemistic way of saying TAG uses computers to kill their targets.

Think cars that are all computer operated and which have Internet access to better serve the driver and keep him/her safe. Think hospital equipment all computer controlled to make sure every aspect of a patient is monitored and every drop of medication promptly applied. Think elevators in every commercial building over a story tall. Think every home that has digital assistants like Alexa and Siri and Google.

Yates Was an NSA employee until she retired and started up her own company quite a ways west of Fort Meade, Maryland - out in Montana. There with the use of "the most powerful antennas, satellite dishes, and computer servers available", their technology would "allow them to reach out to any computer in the world as long as it was connect to the Internet". As Marcus, her co-founder, put it, they could "reach out and touch" a target without having to be close and thus in danger themselves.

We are told early in the first adventure that "Ms. Yates is a one-hundred-and-ten-pound, blonde-haired, green-eyed firestorm that hails from Texas. Max Yates, her father, was an Air Force pilot who flew during America's conflicts with the Middle East. Service is in Jen's blood, and she chose to uphold traditions. She earned a computer science degree from Virginia Tech and used it as a ticket into the National Security Agency, specifically Tailored Access Operations - the United States' most elite group of digital espionage experts. There isn't a computer the men and women in this directorate can't break into, extract information from, or control."

I've said for a couple other series in which computer hacking plays a major role in the skillset of the main character, I am particularly fond of them because it allows me to live out a bizarre fantasy, seeing as I, like Jen Yates, have made my living with computers. Like her, I was the head of a computer company (for a while). So it is fun to sort of pretend that I am in her shoes (so to speak and without any heels). Except when the bullets start flying and people start dying. Then I turn the show over to Yates and her creator, J.W. Clay.

And those are some quite capable hands, too. The books are well written and the plot extremely exciting and I have a blast with the time I spent in Yate's universe and would not mind going back there in the future.