William Gibson's long been delivering prescient prose to a generation of future-fascinated techies, so that when this latest effort, Spook Country, followed up his Pattern Recognition with yet more airs of modern day unknowing, some might have thought it a fateful redirect in his thinking. Milgrin, a tweaking Russian translator addicted to "Rize" (sadly, not of the krumping and klowning variety but of a fictional anxiety-crushing Schedule Four designer narcotic) intones: "Cities ... had a way of revealing themselves in the faces of their inhabitants, and particularly on their way to work in the morning. There was a sort of basic fuckedness index to be read, then, in faces that hadn't yet encountered the reality of whatever they were on their way to do." The feeling is one less of paranoia than of desperation—even submission.

At heart, it's a standard-issue thriller storied around the droll world of the shipping industry, and it may not appear to make for the most alluring summer read. But after one of Gibson's characters offers a quick primer on the machinations of the shipping world, complete with tales of CIA backed infiltrators and modern-day swashbucklers, it's easy to be hooked.

Gibson's female protagonist, Hollis Henry, a frequently recognized and jaded former member of a defunct cult band The Curfew, has been deployed as a freelance reporter recruited to explore (ostensibly) an art movement dubbed "locative" art—as manifested by the morbid virtual renderings of River Phoenix's sidewalk bucket-kick outside the Viper Room and Helmut Newton's fatal collision outside the Chateau Marmont. Soon the real reasons for her research are uncovered and our sleuthing Siouxsie Sioux's pursuits are paralleled and sometimes aided by Gibson's cast of spooks. There's Tito, an APC-geared operative in a clandestine family of protocol-adhering "illegal facilitators"; Hubertus Bigend, a repeat performer from Gibson's Pattern Recognition, this time as Hollis' bankrolling employer who has her on the case; and an ambiguous network of government-type professionals with high-tech scramblers, vehicles, weapons, and matching accessories. The roving cast is the cause of vertiginous head spinning, but Gibson graciously ties them all together in the pursuit of a missing shipping container carrying unknown but precious cargo.

Gibson's prose and adept storytelling keep it all churning, making the reader acutely sensitive to the sketchiness of a rogue container filled with questionable cargo in our terror-ridden times. Throw in a couple of virtual reality celebri-deaths, an intense chase scene through Union Square, a Glock-securing botched drug buy, and the novel's own fuckedness index shoots off the charts—thankfully.—Justin Gallaher