Product Description

What happens when old spies come out to play one last game? In New York a young Cuban called Tito is passing iPods to a mysterious old man. Such activities do not go unnoticed, however, in these early days of the War on Terror and across the city an ex-military man named Brown is tracking Tito’s movements. Meanwhile in LA, journalist Hollis Henry is on the trail of Bobby Chombo, who appears to know too much about military systems for his own good. With Bobby missing and the trail cold, Hollis digs deeper and is drawn into the final moves of a chilling game played out by men with old scores to settle …

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2162 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

About the Author
William Gibson is the award-winning author of Pattern Recognition, Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, The Difference Engine, Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Customer Reviews

meandering with bright points but short on ideas
This book meanders about. Majority of the book is 3 separate stories that link at the end - but the stories are mixed up so a challenge to track whats actually going on. If you take a couple of weeks to get through, then this bouncing between plots is confusing & irritating.

As to the rather shallow plot (or plots), we all know that this book is REALLY about techy what-if cyberspace stuff - the plot is just a platform for Gibson to exhibit & expound his concepts & imagination. I cant help feeling that the author was a bit tired & short on ideas when he wrote this one.

The dark atmosphere is well created. Namedropping of designer brands is tiresome & begins to grate. I do actually know about Stark furniture so can appreciate these touches - but the continual reference to brands of phone / shoe / hotel / coat / sunglasses etc really alienates me!

If you are a loyal follower of Gibson (as most reviewers seem to be) you wont be dissapointed. It still is a good read - and certainly improves when the plots come together in the last chapter, but its not his best.

Give it up Bill
The grand old man of that dead genre: Cyberpunk (which was neither punk nor spectacularly technologically savvy, unlike say, Neal Stephenson) is back to bore us rigid. A shaggy dog story which goes absolutely nowhere. While Gibson's old narrative trick (and let's face it, he only has one) - to take three narrative threads and alternate them by chapter until in some hopeless contrivance they all join together at the end - works quite nicely, the tedious techno porn (everything has a matte black or grey surface) and the barely beleivable characters (pesky things in Gibson's sad world) just drag the whole thing down.
The ending is basically a total let-down. Since Mona Lisa Overdrive this guy's stuff has got more and more derivative and lame.
It's modern life as viewed by someone who's too rich, too lazy and too self-regarding to really have any literary merit whatsoever.
Avoid.

Go back to the future, William Gibson!
This is William Gibson's first novel set explicitly in the proper present, so it lacks that sense of exploring the near future which so haunts all his other books. For me this meant that instead of letting myself get swept away into the story, I kept comparing Spook Country's events with what I know to be the case about the times in which I live.

Gibson has done the art world before - Neuromancer I think features a search for artworks by the real-life eccentric Joseph Cornell. This book switches uneasily between art and more serious intrigue... sometimes even uncomfortably.

But for me there was too much real life! I enjoyed all the stuff about the ex-rock band singer Hollis Henry, but every time there was a mention of Philip Starck hotels or Pete Townshend's nose or ... anything real, I just slightly cringed. I just wanted to go back to the world Gibson usually sites his books in, where everything is made up, and enjoying that fictionality and that level of imagination is one of the pleasures of reading.

There were even some things which I thought were mistakes. One tiny example that doesn't spoil the plot: there is a supposed Wikipedia entry on one of the characters, which Hollis reads. Seriously, NO wikipedia entry is that well-written. Really. Even the ones people write for themselves.

Having made my criticisms, what I will say about William Gibson is that he has the most amazing imagination, and writes completely beautifully, in this dark, twisted way. The book has a good plot line, although slightly spy story-ish.. I'm glad I finally got round to reading it. He will always be one of my favourite writers. But from now on, I just want him to leave the present alone. Give me back my William Gibson, rainy California, quantumteleporting, cyberspace future!