Spook Country

English language

Published Aug. 7, 2009

ISBN:
978-0-14-192358-1
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4 stars (2 reviews)

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 ...

7 editions

Mediocre

3 stars

It was a bit weird for me to read Gibson outside of Sci-Fi genre. For example, while his brand heavy descriptions give credence & lived-in texture to a more fantastical cyberpunk setting, here they can be a bit cumbersome. Even in Pattern Recognition they were thematically appropriate, but here they felt kinda out of place.

In light of recent 2020s tech trends It was also funny to see a purportedly "non-fictional" 2000s world in which high fidelity AR goggles are commonplace, but everyone looses their minds about GPS.

Otherwise, the novel is perfectly serviceable. Pace is good, character motivations mostly check out. There's some "eccentric billionaire with goldfish-like attention span" reasoning, but that too seems plausible. In the end mystery is revealed, plot points solved, good guys win & bad guys lose.

In the end it left me craving for a more traditional Sci-Fi read.

A ride

4 stars

Loved the characters. Would like to see more of them. I'm am sure I can't write a review to do it justice, but it was fascinating to me. The juxtaposition of old mainstream tech from 2006-7 with more futuristic devices, the then-time American political situation compared to today's current flavor of madness, and my own memories of playing the augmented reality real-world location-based game Ingress compared to the book's interesting locative art. I enjoyed the dry sense of humor. There was no "Womp womp" trumpet accompanying the carefully placed sentences. I look forward to diving into the third book in the series.