Looking forward to a new W. Gibson, but kind of disappointed.
It's set in today's time; I love his cyberpunk stories and the strangeness of them, the familiarity with which he throws around the weirdest stuff, everything so familiar to him yet as a reader you grapple to understand it all.
And that's what bothered me most here; he mentions a dozen times she "grabbed her Powerbook". Ok, we got it, a laptop, fine. And a big boss, someone who presumably can create a darknet at will, "hasn't set his WEP". First of all, that guy should know to set his WPA2, not WEP, second, and more importantly, it's a password. Doesn't matter what or how!
The repeating of (fake) brandnames or styles in cyberpunk works well, nay, is necessary because the reader is utterly unfamiliar with them. You need the repetition to slowly form a full image of something in your mind. With day-to-day objects like laptops and the such.. we don't need that.
Also, the characters, the story; it all gets only mildly interesting. The clou, I couldn't really care much about it.
The style, short chapters of 3 - 6 pages, cycling through the three storylines gives a nice impression of everything happening at once, without getting lost.
Yet, at most a 6.
