Beneath Bali’s sun-soaked beaches and the glittering facade of influencer culture, a digital plague is spreading—and it’s deadlier than anyone realizes.
Callum Vey, a disgraced data scientist hiding in Jakarta’s shadowy underbelly, stumbles upon a glitch in a viral #OceanGuard campaign. What appears to be performative activism—influencers weeping over bleached coral reefs—is actually a Trojan horse for a devastating ransomware attack. But this is no ordinary hack. The malware, embedded in every post, is a financial neutron bomb designed to crash the EU’s carbon market and unleash chaos on a global scale.
When Pulitzer-winning journalist Tasia Boone’s brother, a marine biologist investigating counterfeit reef restoration projects, vanishes off Komodo Island, she’s drawn into a labyrinth of deepfakes, drone warfare, and shadowy hacker collectives. Reluctantly, she teams up with Callum, whose guilt-ridden past and razor-sharp intellect make him both an asset and a liability. Together, they uncover a conspiracy that weaponizes the very systems meant to save the planet: carbon credits, blockchain ledgers, and the viral reach of social media.
From Berlin’s hacker squats to the Congo Basin’s ravaged forests, *Influencer Zero* is a pulse-pounding thriller that exposes the dark intersection of technology, activism, and greed. As Callum and Tasia race to stop the enigmatic hacker collective Kraken, they must confront their own complicity in a world where every click has consequences.
With the cerebral intensity of *Dark Matter* and the urgent relevance of *Nomadland*, Erika Sandoval crafts a story that’s as thought-provoking as it is unputdownable. *Influencer Zero* doesn’t just ask if we can hack the system—it demands we question who wrote the code in the first place.
Prepare to be hooked from the first page to the last. The stakes are high, the twists are relentless, and the truth is more dangerous than anyone imagined.
