Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway

 

These days, Nick Harkaway is filling in blank spaces in his dad's ouevre, but dude's got some game of his own--I'm sure he finds what he's doing now much more remunerative, and that's not a thing I'm going to snark on, but I do wish he would chase his own muses still. This book is a really taut noirish SF novel that doesn't have even a whiff of cyberpunk about it (well, maybe the occasionally lethal corporate maneuvering ...) that basically treats the Sf aspects as facts of the world, there's no worldbuilding as such deployed; the blurb on the front cover from Gibson seems amazingly apt, in that and several other ways, now that I think about it. The prose has some terse dry British humor (shocking given the author is a Brit) but there's a distinct snarl deployed as needed; the characters are really pretty spot-on without any real caricature; the pacing and plot are practically taut enough for a highwire act. Really, really good, and I'll definitely be looking for more of his own novels.