Still good, but far from the best 
Since Pattern Recognition, Gibson is bringing his stories to the present time, leaving his previous choice of staging the plot in a nebulous future. But there are some strange things going on in the present; in Pattern Recognition, storie moved around the social network space - more precisely, a group of people the followed some posts of movie fragments. In this "Spook Country" the forward-looking feature is the geolocation, and the action moves around a group of artists that create their work aroun GPS-enabled devices. There are also lots of military types - the spooks from the title - and the story goes back and forth from the art to the war. I think that Gibson's main point is described somewhere in the book - technology advances through the army and the artists.
The starting point is intersting, but for the readers that enjoyed Pattern Recognition this new work lacks action and chemistry. The idea is indeed original and well crafted, enough to make you keep the interest until the end of the story. But don't expect a new Pattern Recognition.
The Future is Now and Gibson is still there! 
The "follow the bouncing Character" is always enjoyable for me. Gibson links it so well that I can read a chapter or 3 late at night and enjoy every minute of reading and the anticipation of the next chapter!Interesting people, nice yarn; Gibson always come through for me!
Another in the Gibson formula
Spook Country is in the same formula as Pattern Recognition. A young hip female protagonist is pulled into a job to find a shipping container for an unknown reason. The organization that is funding her is a secretive advertising agency with an over funded over bearing own who keeps showing up at improbable times. We never learn who the mysterious container belongs to, nor do we learn much about the other group competing for the container.
So Spook Country like Pattern Recognition features a number of mysterious organizations, a strange activity being done for a vague reason. These things are never really explained in the book, or if they are the explanation is not satisfying.
Gibson is a good writer so Spook Country is engrossing. It features his vivid descriptions of the objects and locations that help set a scene. In my opinion it has very little else to recommend it.
Brilliant, but not perfect
The good: This book has some brilliant characters which ultimately intertwine around a caper based climax at the end. The writing is clever and a joy to read, and paints a very realistic and plausible world, once you get past the first chapter, which was like another reviewer mentioned like wading through overly descriptive mud.
The reason it isn't perfect was that I felt the climax, which had been building nicely, didn't come to as much resolution as I would have liked. Of course there is enough material to do some sort of sequel, but that is up to Mr. Gibson.
All in all, worth the read, but not his best work.
Pick up idoru instead
I've read all of William Gibson's recent books and I think this one is the least enjoyable. The unique subcultures in most of his recent books have been engrossing but in comparison spook-country's art scene seems cobbled-together and tacked-on. Entirely too normal to be a Gibson book.
reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
"Tito is in his early twenties. Born in Cuba, he speaks fluent Russian, lives in one room in a NoLita warehouse, and does delicate jobs involving information transfer. Hollis Henry is an investigative journalist, on assignment from a magazine called Node. Node doesn't exist yet, which is fine; she's used to that. But it seems to be actively blocking the kind of buzz that magazines normally cultivate before they start up. Really actively blocking it. It's odd, even a little scary, if Hollis lets herself think about it much. Which she doesn't; she can't afford to. Milgrim is a junkie. A high-end junkie, hooked on prescription antianxiety drugs. Milgrim figures he wouldn't survive twenty-four hours if Brown, the mystery man who saved him from a misunderstanding with his dealer, ever stopped supplying those little bubble packs. What exactly Brown is up to Milgrim can't say, but it seems to be military in nature. At least, Milgrim's very nuanced Russian would seem to be a big part of it, as would breaking into locked rooms. Bobby Chombo is a 'producer,' and an enigma. In his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for manufacturers of military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry has been told to find him. Pattern Recognition was a bestseller on every list of every major newspaper in the country, reaching #4 on the New York Times list. It was also a BookSense top ten pick, a WordStock bestseller, a best book of the year for Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Economist, and a Washington Post 'rave.' Spook Country is the perfect follow-up to Pattern Recognition, which was called by The Washington Post (among many glowing reviews), 'One of the first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century.'"
40 Best Kindle Sci-Fi (Science Fiction)
spook country, country, spook
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