The plot comprises the intersecting tales of three protagonists: Hollis Henry, a musician-turned-journalist researching a story on locative art; Tito, a young Cuban-Chinese operative whose family is on occasion in the employ of a renegade ex-CIA agent; and Milgrim, a drug-addled translator held captive by Brown, a strangely authoritarian and secretive man.

She is hired by advertising mogul Hubertus Bigend to write a story for his nascent magazine Node (described as a European Wired) about the use of locative technology in the art world.

Tito is part of a Chinese Cuban family of freelance "illegal facilitators", as Brown describes them – forgers, smugglers, and associated support personnel based in New York City – and is assigned by his uncles to hand over a series of iPods to a mysterious old man.

The identity of the old man remains unclear, though context implies that he may be Pattern Recognition's protagonist Cayce Pollard's father, having removed himself from the channels of normal life to focus on disrupting what he sees as criminal elements operating in the United States Government.

[7] Although he had intended his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition to be a standalone work, elements of it manifested in the script of its eventual successor, including the character of amoral marketing guru Hubertus Bigend.

[8] Despite his finding compelling the idea of a digital grid mapping the surface of the earth, Gibson saw little storytelling traction in geocaching and geohacking, and instead reworked the material into the locative art of the novel.

[11] The novel exhibits Gibson's characteristic brand awareness (a key plot element of Pattern Recognition), which he honed while poring over catalogues of products as part of his writing process.

[16] In an interview to promote the release of the novel, Gibson revealed that one of the issues that had most affected his writing process since Pattern Recognition was the sense that everything in the text was potentially searchable online.

The author, under the nom de plume patternBoy, mobilised a cadre of volunteers to track the references and collate the cloud of data surrounding the work – those elements of the story with footprints on internet resources such as Google and Wikipedia.

"[21] One of the elements of the novel that the author found most poignant was that of class division and how there is a subset of people who have access to a world of power and wealth that the vast majority will never experience, of which Gibson cited Brown and his evidently routine use of a private jet as an example.

[5] The author felt that at the time of writing, such social chasms were widening, and drew parallels to the Victorian era as well as to the world of his breakthrough novel Neuromancer (1984) in which there is no middle class, only the super-rich and a predominantly criminal underclass.

And I think that's probably not a good direction.In an interview with The Telegraph promoting the novel, Gibson conjectured that the world was moving to a situation wherein social status is determined by "connectivity" – access to communications technology – rather than material wealth.

"[22][25][26] After crafting 100 pages of that novel, he was compelled to re-write the main character's backstory, which the attacks had suddenly rendered implausible; this he called "the strangest experience I've ever had with a piece of fiction.

[28] Nathan Lee in The Village Voice advanced the notion that while Pattern Recognition focused to an extent on "specifying the ambient sense of invasiveness in all aspects of life after the collapse of the towers", Spook Country accepted that anxiety as a premise, and was thus "the more reflective, less unnerving of the two novels".

[1] "Spook Country, in essence," pronounced The Telegraph's Tim Martin, "is a classic paranoid quest narrative, but one that refashions the morbid surveillance tropes of the Cold War for a post-Iraq era".

[40] Ken Barnes of USA Today found that "[l]andscapes, events and points of view shift constantly, so that the reader never truly feels on solid ground", but judged the novel to be a "vivid, suspenseful and ultimately coherent tale".

Although he is a very different sort of writer, Gibson, like DeLillo, writes fiction that is powerfully attuned to the currents of dread, dismay and baffled fury that permeate our culture.

With a clear eye and a minimum of editorial comment, Gibson shows us a country that has drifted dangerously from its governing principles, evoking a kind of ironic nostalgia for a time when, as one character puts it, "grown-ups still ran things."

In Spook Country, Gibson takes another large step forward and reaffirms his position as one of the most astute and entertaining commentators on our astonishing, chaotic present.Ed Park of the Los Angeles Times hailed the novel as a "puzzle palace of bewitching proportions and stubborn echoes", noting the fact that antihero Hubertus Bigend was the most prominent link to Pattern Recognition as "deliciously sinister".

[40] Although he conceded that the novel's main Henry/Bigend storyline felt lightweight, Matt Thorne writing in The Independent conjectured that it was part of Gibson's conscious design that that thread "plays out against a backdrop of hidden machinations that have a much darker, wider resonance".

[43] The author's prose was also extolled by Clay Evans of the Daily Camera, and by Benjamin Lytal in The New York Sun, who declared that "the real news, in Spook Country, is that much of the flair that Mr. Gibson once brought to descriptions of cyberspace seems to fit perfectly, now, on all kinds of things.

[2] Neil Drumming, of Entertainment Weekly, in awarding the novel a "B" rating concurred, complaining that the protagonists "often just feel like higher-tech automatons with useful features" whose actions are the product of manipulation by "external forces and cagey operatives" rather than conscious decisions.

[50] In The Daily Telegraph, Roger Perkins was more blunt, remarking that the "relentless pace and breathless dislocation" of the plot hid "character development that's as deep as dental veneer but equally shiny".

[51] Matt Thorne summed up the issue in opining that "The problem with a thriller which begins with a technology journalist talking to an experimental artist is that, no matter how exciting the events later become, it's hard to care.

[43] San Francisco Chronicle reviewer Michael Berry called it "an ingenious reversal" which proved that despite its apparent cynicism, the novel was "oddly optimistic for a ghost story".

[52] Overall, Thorne judged the novel ultimately unsatisfactory on account of the underwhelming ending and because Gibson "hides the full complications of the plot so successfully that it feels as if everything important is happening offstage".

"[51] His colleague Martin mused that along with the regular Gibsonian tropes, there was "something new ... a dark and very contemporary surge of suspicion and bad faith" in the novel which suggested that the author might be approaching the apex of his writing.