It concludes the informal trilogy begun by Pattern Recognition (2003) and continued by Spook Country (2007), and features the characters Hollis Henry and Milgrim from the latter novel as its protagonists.

Hollis Henry and Milgrim find themselves in London working for Hubertus Bigend, unaware that their lives previously crossed in Spook Country.

Milgrim is sent to South Carolina to take photographs of a pair of Army BDUs where he gains the notice of a federal agent named Winnie Tung Whittaker employed by DCIS.

Events reach a climax at night in Wormwood Scrubs (an open space in London) where the mercs demand the prisoner exchange take place.

Gibson acknowledges the help of other authors:[1] James Purdon, writing in the Guardian, called the series "one of the first great novels of 21st-century data culture", while criticizing them for lack of depth and technological innovation.