Digital Fortress: A Thriller

Written by Dan Brown

Narrated by Bruce Sabath

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Jan 1, 2004
• ISBN: 9781593973971

Dan Brown

Dan Brown is a graduate of Amherst College and Phillips Exeter Academy, where he spent time as an English teacher before turning his efforts fully to writing. In 1996, his interest in code-breaking and covert government agencies led him to write his first novel, DIGITAL FORTRESS. His fourth book, THE DA VINCI CODE, was a world-wide bestseller of all time. His novels have been translated and published in more than 30 languages around the world.

Reviews for Digital Fortress

[Bruna · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Easy read and I enjoyed the story, great adventure for the wknd

[nicole · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A simple thriller that is not Dan Brown.s calibre. Disappointing

[Karthik Balaji M · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Nothing was good you know... everything was just bull shit

[pan0ramix-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Tempted to tag this as fantasy but I'll let it go. This book challenged my ability to suspend disbelief beyond its limit.

[chris · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

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.

[Rener De Jesus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The voices are so realistic, I like the drama. Bravo!

[Jamie Lauer · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

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.

[don · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was great. I would rec this to anyone else!

[Lena · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Another gem from Dan Brown. I loved it. I was so invested in the characters.

[jaimelesmaths · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[katieloucks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

So good! I love reading books like these, and Dan Brown didn't disappoint with this book

[fletch68 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[ponsonby_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

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.

[torterajirka · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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

[shanaqui_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Gripping, though in the Dan brown formula. (See my review on [book: Deception Point] for my thoughts on that.)

[milliehennessy · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[Matthew Higgins · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[Bruce · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Awful. Just completely unbelievable situations and events, and not exciting ones either.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

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.

[bsuktitipat · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Social engineering in action!

There’s no better example than hacking dNSA!

[briars_reviews · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Dan Brown has yet again made a book that had me hooked onto his every word. This man needs to make more books and fast!

In this novel, Susan is a cryptographer who learns about a brand new, unbreakable code called Digital Fortress. She must try to save the agency back in America while her lover is in Europe trying to save the NSA by finding the "safe key" to stop the code as well.

This novel has twists and turns I didn't see coming, much like every other Dan Brown book I have read. There isn't anything more I could ask of Dan Brown in this book, since it was perfection to me. The chapters weren't super long, I learned many new facts and the novel kept me hooked onto every word he wrote.

Anyone who likes a good mystery novel that is fast paced and addicting should pick up a Dan Brown book. It's so hard to put his novels down!

Five out of five stars!

[hvg13 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Dan stands out for his futuristic vision regarding technology; this book is no exception. However, the ending is somewhat predictable, like in every American movie. Nevertheless, the theme, the beginning, and the development are excellent, and the characters are very good. (Translated from Spanish)

[Jumadefe · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It's not one of the best books by Dan Brown, and it shows a complete ignorance of the city of Seville. The plot isn't very believable. It's fine if you don't read it. (Translated from Spanish)

[guia.delibros · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

With a technological lexicon that was initially hard for me to get into, Dan Brown does it again. While this book is different from the others by this author, it is just as good. It's a detective story, suspenseful, and full of intrigue. I liked it a lot! (Translated from Spanish)

[Leiag · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Due to a series of reasons that are not relevant, I couldn't pick a book from my eternal library list. That's why I started reading this one that I've had at home for 20 years.
In the past, I read The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, and I liked them. This is Dan Brown's first book.
It's not bad if you like topics related to encryption and computers. It's entertaining and has some twists, but they are quite predictable.
It is set in Seville, and honestly, even though I don't know the city, I didn't like some derogatory comments. I expected more, but since I had it pending for a long time... one less to read.
You know, about tastes...books. (Translated from Spanish)

[BraynerRamrez · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very good book for those of us who are fans of this great author. (Translated from Spanish)

[Lilimed · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very easy-to-read book, with the characteristic suspense that the author brings to his novels. It talks about a million-dollar machine that deciphers global codes. (Translated from Spanish)

[patxi77 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A revealing book that time has proven to be more reality than fiction. (Translated from Spanish)

[Eliar11 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ameno, recommended (Translated from Spanish)

[arkrayder · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

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.