I'm a huge William Gibson fan. I started reading his novels in my mid-20s and have enjoyed every one I have read. I don't often love sci-fi, but I find Gibson's work, while not completely accessible, definitely mind-bending, and it's a trip I always enjoy taking. Neuromancer took me a bit to get into, but I felt rewarded once I got deeper into the story, Idoru was beautiful and bizarre - exactly like the novel's setting of Japan, and Pattern Recognition is a book I would recommend to everyone and is always on my top 10 list.

This brings us to Spook Country, William Gibson's latest novel. Set in present day LA and New York, with a climax in Gibson's home town (and mine!) of Vancouver, Spook Country is a great read. Every Gibson novel has one memorable piece of technology, and Spook Country is no different. The novel provides a fascinating look into locative art - GPS mixed with virtual reality - bringing to "real life" events such as River Phoenix's death. While there are many artists in the novel working on locative art, all of them rely on Bobby Chombo, a producer of sorts and a paranoid geospatial technologies expert who won't sleep in the same spot on his grid twice.

The story is told through the experiences of three characters - Hollis Henry, the former lead singer of a cult band and a journalist currently working for Node, a new (potentially non-existant) magazine that might just be Europe's answer to Wired; Tito, member of a Chinese Cuban spy/crime family that conducts "information transfer" in Russian and volapuk, text messaging in the Cyrillic alphabet; and Milgrim an Ativan addict kidnapped by a secretive man name Brown, who has used Milgrim's addiction and paranoia to coerce him to translate Russian. Of course the characters, including Chombo, are all intertwined, and Gibson does a good job of layering and creating intrigue amongst them.

Coming off of Pattern Recognition, arguably his best book, Spook Country may not live up to the brilliance of Gibson's dissection of the advertising industry, but he does provide a well developed story, interesting characters and enough mystery and intrigue to make me think maybe he should consult on the next Bond film. In typical Gibson fashion everything is described so vividly you feel like you are right there with the characters. Every person he describes, every piece of art, every place he mentions I can visualize clearly, and for this alone I would recommend reading Spook Country.