At the heart of Spook Country, Gibson lays out a very interesting idea: how much of our day-to-day lives can really be tracked? Set in modern times (unlike his prelude to the Matrix movies, Neuromancer), Spook Country deals with two intersecting, but very different, worlds. The first is a world in which artists create works that can be seen only in virtual reality, and the second is a world where mysterious, maniacal spies track shipping containers that never reach port.

Hollis Henry is a rocker-turned-journalist, on assignment for a magazine that no one has ever heard of and doing a piece on artwork that does not exist. She links up with a French gallery curator, who shows her work by an artist who takes you back to famous celebrity deaths – all through a virtual reality headset. It is art that no one knows is there – there is no indication on the street that art is taking place, and Hollis has her doubts that anyone will ever see this locative art.

Meanwhile, a mysterious group of Cuban-Chinese in Chinatown are preparing for a mission, and a government agent (or not) named Brown seems determined to stop them. Hollis digs deeper and soon finds that the unstable Bobby Chombo knows more about the world than just the locative art he helps produce. She continues to get in deeper and deeper, putting herself right in the middle of a deadly spy game.

Spook Country is, like most of Gibson’s novels, about an idea more than a story. He spends a lot of time massaging the ideas in this book, and it takes well over the first third of the book to figure out the basic plot. And, like most of Gibson’s novels, this is not an easy read – between the slow start and the very odd assortment of characters, it sometimes becomes difficult to see what’s happening. However, for fans of the techno-thriller genre, Gibson is one of the best, and Spook Country will more than satisfy those readers. The action, when it does come, is crisp, well-defined and engaging, but there may not be enough there for harder-core thriller readers who expect a death every twenty pages.

However, as with any book that focuses on ideas, it is always a little unsatisfying as a reader because the author never takes the book in all the directions that a reader might want it to go. For example, would anyone actually view or want to own “locative” art that is housed solely in virtual reality? Is something art if it only exists in virtual space? And what if there was a way to track all of our movements through cell phones? The taxi drivers in New York think that GPS systems in their cabs are tantamount to an invasion of privacy, and Gibson looks like he agrees in Spook Country. This is certainly one of Gibson’s best books, and while it may not lead to the next Matrix, it certainly will open your eyes to the dark underbelly of global positioning systems.