Ruth Run

by Elizabeth Kaufman ★★☆☆☆

Reading a debut novel is a great risk-reward exercise: you can find yourself early to the party, seeing a first-time author knock it out of the park (like Jakob Kerr in Dead Money), or you can struggle through a story that has potential but falls flat on execution. Unfortunately, Ruth Run finds itself in the second category.

We meet our protagonist, twenty-six-year-old Ruth, as she's awakened in the middle of the night when one of her electronic tripwires set off a series of alarms. Ruth is a cyber thief, having engineered a chip with an undetectable backdoor that allows her to infiltrate any networking system on which the chip is used. She also happens to work as "the senior product line manager for bank security at the world's largest network equipment company." She'd leveraged that job to position her chip into several banking systems, allowing her to skim hundreds of millions of dollars into a series of offshore bank accounts.

Ruth is a bit of an anti-hero. She knows she's not exactly good, but justifies it with a Robin Hood-esque mentality. "Our world is full of excess," she says. "Too much stuff, too many rules about it. So I work around those rules to get what I need. I'm skilled, and I'm careful. No one misses what I take. Maybe now you're judging me, but it's not like I mugged old people. I skimmed chump change from banks. Are you really going to side with a bank? I know if you could do what I can do, you would no shit have done what I did. I know it."

Ruth says she's careful, but now, it looks like the jig is up. How would you expect Ruth to react? If you said, "Take six hours to methodically delete everything at her apartment, and then drive to her office," congratulations, your idea of "careful" is the same as first-time author Elizabeth Kaufman's. Ostensibly, Ruth feels obligated to warn (in person?) her partner-in-crime, Thom. This was the first in a series of head-scratching decisions in the book. She collects Thom, they narrowly (and unbelievably) avoid capture at the office, and they stay barely ahead of their pursuers. As they flee, Ruth and Thom realize there must be a tracker somewhere in the car or embedded within their clothes. After ditching everything at a Walmart, do they take advantage of the narrow window they've carved out to put some distance between themselves and those trying to catch them? No, they wait in the Walmart parking lot for their pursuers to arrive.

Ruth can't be smart enough and cautious enough to create an entire series of plan-ahead contingencies (and continuously avoid capture for the duration of the book), while also being dumb enough to make many of the decisions that she does. I appreciate a nuanced character who isn't magically always one step ahead, but there were too many holes here. Combine that with a really bizarre choice for the cat to Ruth's mouse, a mid-level Homeland Security officer named Mike. Mike happened to see Ruth change her records as a college student, recognized her criminal potential, and then proceeded to conduct off-the-books surveillance of her for the next seven years with a stalker's intensity and loose grasp of reality. As Mike puts it, "She was nineteen when I first saw her. I have been her mentor, her protector, her watcher, and her warmest admirer ever since." Mike's entire story arc was weird, creepy, and tone-deaf, and it definitely did not help the story.

Overall, I'm mostly disappointed by the unrealized potential of Ruth Run. The basic idea of the story was a good one, but the execution suffered greatly. A generous bump to two stars for the the story summary and setup that had me hoping for something great, but this is a mess of a book that should be avoided.