Spook Country

Spook Country is a thriller by William Gibson, published in 2007 and set in a contemporary North America of cargo containers, city streets and screens rather than in an imagined future.

The novel follows three strands that keep intersecting. Hollis Henry, once the singer in a band, is now a journalist hired by a magazine called Node, which has not launched and appears to be actively preventing the publicity a new magazine would normally want. Tito is a young man raised in Cuba and fluent in Russian who performs delicate information transfers for a family that occasionally works for a renegade former intelligence officer. Milgrim is a translator with an expensive prescription drug habit, kept close by Brown, a secretive and oddly authoritarian man who stepped in when a dealer became a problem. What connects the three of them is an object, a client and a piece of the recent past that several well-resourced people want to reach first.

Gibson writes thrillers about the present tense, and this one is interested in how locative technology and the politics of the years after 2001 change what secrecy can mean.