You have to credit Gibson with, if nothing else, extreme courage. He has a proven gift for inventing alternate realities that huge numbers of people are willing to buy his books about, and after a couple of decades of that, here he is with a linear-narrative type thriller set firmly in 2002.
I think it's a pretty good book. The characters are engaging, and his illumination of the worlds of technology, fashion, and money seems, to the extent that I know them, accurate and revealing. It suffers from a few of the usual Gibson tics - a shadowy, fabulously wealthy foreigner pulling the strings, pages of exotic-foreign-city atmospherics, and cascades of sentences that begin with subject-less verbs.
On the other hand, it's a real page-turner, and Gibson's occasional gift for a sentence that you have to go back and read three or four more times is perhaps unequalled. I'll read it again.
