William Gibson Set in the same high-tech present day as Pattern Recognition, Gibson's fine ninth novel offers startling insights into our paranoid and often fragmented, postmodern world. When a mysterious, not yet actual magazine, Node, hires former indie rocker–turned–journalist Hollis Henry to do a story on a new art form that exists only in virtual reality, Hollis finds herself investigating something considerably more dangerous. An operative named Brown, who may or may not work for the U.S. government, is tracking a young, Russian-speaking Cuban-Chinese criminal named Tito. image/jpeg 41cUmZPl9aL.jpg 8055 2008-03-09T01:07:59Z 14 2008-04-07 17 384 2 Pattern Recognition is one of my favorite novels of the past decade, so I was very excited when I learned that Spook Country took place in the same "universe." Unfortunately it's not quite as good as Pattern Recognition, the story is just a little too thin for my taste. The one bright spot in the book is the character of Tito, but Gibson should be suspended by his thumbs for not developing him. Tito is the "Case" of this novel and Gibson doesn't evolve him past a mere outline. His "systema" is genuinely intriguing and.. largely ignored in the book. This is a definite throw-away. It's full of references that will date it in under 4 years, which might matter if it the book's climax was more interesting than some guy climbing a box to put magnets over bullet holes. 2008-03-24 finished http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook_Country