3.5 stars
In the beginning of this book, Kade is using his back door to Nexus to make sure it is not being used by people driven by chaos. In one instant, a man is using a virus passed through Nexus, to coerce a girl to letting him rape her:
"Memories came back, streaming from bogdan's mind. Corfu. Ibiza. Mykonos. Three Nexus-aided thefts. One leading to a murder.
And worse. He caught a glimpse of a girl, terrified, senses mentally crippled, her clothes half ripped off, her body held down by bogdan's will and his perverted code as he...
Kade grimaced, and yanked himself away from bogdan's memory. Thousands of miles away, his stomach rose up. His fists clenched.
You're disgusting, Bogdan.
Kade started in on the rewiring, tying neural circuits together. Bogdan's knowledge of programming. His understanding of Nexus. His concept of violence. His capacity for sexual arousal. All of these Kade tied to nausea, to crippling anxiety, to pervasive pain.
The man yelled at him. What are you doing?
I'm neutering you, Kade told him, Grim satisfaction rising in his thoughts. You won't ever steal, or kill, or f*** again.
Bogdan gasped in shock, then resumed his rage. You can't do this! What gives you the right?
I made this, Kade told the man. That gives me the right.

Ilya Alexander, Kade's friend who helped program Nexus 5, is captured and being held prisoner at the homeland security complex. She's been tortured for the passcode to the back door, but nothing has broken her so far. She knows she won't be able to hold out for much longer, so she selects a program within Nexus to end her own life. I almost cried at this part:
"she had to do it. She wouldn't give them the codes. She wouldn't live and have others die or be degraded instead.
Lub-dub.
The meaning of a thing is the impact it has on the world around it, she thought. The meaning of a life is the impact that life has on the world. I won't have my life mean slavery in mind control for others.
Ilya Alexander took one last deep breath, and ran the code she'd written. Her body trembled.
Lub dub. Lub... Dub.
Her heart beat one last time, then nothing. The world began to fade away, bit by final bit.
she heard a tone sound as she left the world behind. An alarm. The sound of a door opening and people rushing in to keep her alive. To break her.
But they were too late. Too late.
As the last light of consciousness left Ilya Alexander, she felt, as if far far away, the thoughts of other minds. Children's minds. Messy, chaotic, and so very... Very... Bright. And her last thought was one of Hope."

Shiva Prasad is a billionaire who promotes children receiving Nexus 5. He believes that Nexus 5 can be used for good in the world. Sam looks up what he's done with his foundation, Mira, because she's hoping to join it when Shiva allows the children that must move from the orphanage where she's helping, to move there with him to his island complex But so far, he won't allow her to come with them:
"A corrupt Laotian Governor -- who'd swapped medicines Mira delivered for fakes, sold the real ones on the black market, hanged in his living room.
A criminal gang in Burma who'd abducted and gangraped three female Mira foundation workers. The gang members had been found hog-tied and chained to the floor, face down on their knees, dead of massive hemorrhaging from the blunt objects they'd been violated with.
No crime had ever been pinned on Mira. But across the net she found the quiet assumption that Mira had been responsible, and approval that they'd taken on the thugs that plagued the developing world.
She reached the case she remembered last. The Dalit orphanage in Bihar, in Northern India. A rumor had spread among villagers that it was the site of transhuman experiments, that loathed Dalit children inside we're being turned into superhuman untouchables with black magical abilities. Tensions had run high. Then one night the orphanage Gates had been chained shut from the outside and the whole structure had been burned to the ground. 35 children and half-a-dozen orphanage staff had burned to death.
Sam Shivered reading it, thinking of her own childhood, of the suspicions of the villagers from mae dong. Of the bottle throwing, the attack on Jake.
There had been a trial, with a lacklustre prosecution and a judge who'd dismissed all charges against the seven villagers charged with the murder.
A week later, those villagers, the judge, and the prosecutor had been found dead, crucified and burned to death just outside the village."
Now that's Justice!

Holtzman is a government scientist who is finding out how corrupt his employers are. He's been told to do work that he's no longer comfortable with: finding a vaccine for children who have been infected with Nexus, and forcing Nexus out of the brains of the children who are imprisoned in the homeland security complex. He finds out that the government started a group pretending to fight the government's attempt to stop post-humans. Domestic Terrorist attacks:
"Someone had used the Nexus from his lab. Someone had used the software his team had built. They'd used it to take control of Steve Travers, to turn him into a robot assassin, they'd used it to tell him to fire.
And to fire half a meter to the left of his Target.
They'd used it to shoot at the president, but not to hit him. To miss.
'they could have at least been better shots!' Anne [his wife] said in his memories.
Oh no. They hit exactly what they meant to.
Who had the most to gain? Nakamura's voice asked him.
Stockton [the president] was losing until the PLF tried to kill him, Anne answered. He's going to win because of the assassination attempt.
The answer was clear.
The president had the most to gain."

This part, where a monk named Ananda had taught Kade how to control his thinking, to fight against the government trying to capture him, trying to torture him to give them information. I need to remember it when my machista ex-husband says cruel things to try to hurt me, and my mind becomes so enraged that I can't think clearly:
"then Ananda was in his thoughts. A memory of the monk.
When you suffer, Ananda had told him, when you rage. When you weep. When you crave. That is when you must still your mind."

I liked this book; I like how Sam stopped working for the CIA, and joined Kade's efforts to stop people working chaos with Nexus. it wasn't as good as the first book; there was just so much of these superhuman soldiers fighting like ninjas.
Moreover, in the afterward by the author, Naam talked about how what happened in this book is being worked on in real life. How experiments are being done on monkeys and rats, implanting things in their brains, to see if they can reach out to other minds.
This is what I hate: using animals without their permission. I've seen videos of monkeys with these horrors implanted in their brains. It brought down my opinion of the author very much, because he spoke of it as if it's a good thing. ( )

I had mixed feelings about this series. I rated it a little higher because the science is, to me, believable and real. I've been into computers and electronics off and on for over 40 years, and "modern" computers for over 25. I was a programmer using the internet by 1990 (mainly newsgroups at that time), so I felt right at home with a lot of the technical talk. Much of the technical terms would be above an average reader's comprehension, though. If that were the case with me, I don't know if I would have enjoyed it very much.

I've read a lot of similar stories where human consciousness is uploaded, duplicated, backed up, etc; it makes you wonder just what makes us who we are, and whether we can effectively live on after our body dies. After all, people have parts of their body replaced without becoming less human, so what if you replace your entire body, and duplicate your memories and brain's capabilities? If you haven't read books that explore these concepts, you might be interested in that aspect of the book.

I also found it interesting to have servers running inside your brain, like having a server running on your computer. This is something else I've had a lot of experience with, so it all seemed real and understandable to me.

However, the main story was a different beast. I was often not sure who were the good guys and the bad guys. Perhaps that was part of the reason for the story - that people are not black or white. Many of the people did bad things for good reasons, but it's hard to know whether they were right to do these things - like trying to force their solutions on people. It was often hard to really be sympathetic toward any of the characters. The one I liked best was Feng, a clone who was built to be a fighter/killing machine. He was definitely the most entertaining to me. But overall, I found the story itself to be unsatisfying. ( )

I really enjoyed Nexus and was excited to see how the story would continue in book 2. As I read Crux I was intrigued by the plot, apparently enough to plod through the clumsy writing and overlook the almost unforgivable number of typos. After I finally made it to the end, after 500 pages of frustration, I was feeling a little less enthusiastic about the plot. I have Apex sitting in front of me now and am trying to work my way through. I am still interested in the premise of the trilogy and want to see how the story ends, but the clunky writing and blatant typos are a serious distraction. ( )

Crux basically picks up where Nexus let off.

Nexus is a force in the world, with more than a million people using it, growing every day. One particularly interesting use is giving Nexus to children with autism to allow them to communicate directly mind to mind. Another is the children that were born to parents using Nexus. Interesting in both cases.

On the negative side, there have already been cases of people using Nexus for more nefarious purposes. Rape. Blackmail. Assassination. Like any new technology, there is the potential for much to go wrong. Something this big? Of course it does.

But where it really starts getting terrifying is when you consider the parallels with what Snowden revealed a few years ago and the current election cycle. The United States government (among others) in the world of Nexus has made such transhuman technology a crime. They are detaining those same children born with Nexus. One of the main storylines of Crux is just how deep such a hidden agenda might go. It's well written.

One note from a structural standpoint is that there is quite a lot of action in this book. It gets to the point where the action itself starts to drag. It could really use a few more breathers. It's certainly not a dealbreaker, but I think Nexus did it better.

All together, an excellent book. I look forward to the conclusion.

Final note: Feng is my favorite. He's hilarious. ( )

Second Nexus book finished! Will there be a third?I do enjoy these techno-thrillers, but the writing is a bit stale. That said, I'll continue to read these! Ramez can only get better. :) ( )