When Gravity Fails

"Cyberpunk" fans will recognize the scenario here - a high-tech near-future featuring a balkanized USA and USSR - to which Effinger (The Wolves of Memory) has added some touches of his own: mind-or mood-altering drugs for any purpose; brains enhanced by electronic hardware, with plug-in memory additions and modules offering the wearer new personalities (James Bond, Nero Wolfe, etc.); bodies shaped to perfection by surgery (whores and transsexuals abound); and the setting, that of a decadent Arab ghetto, the Budayeen. Marid Audran, an unmodified and fairly honest street-survivor, becomes involved in a series of inexplicable murders. Some seem like routine assassinations, carried out with an old-fashioned handgun by a man wearing a plug-in James Bond persona; others, involving whores, feature prolonged torture and horrible mutilations. The problem comes to the attention of Budayeen godfather Friedlander Bey (the whores also worked for him as spies and assassins), who makes Audran an offer he can't refuse. So Audran submits to electronic brain enhancement in order to track down and deal with the killer or killers. Audran suffers the usual vicissitudes of the hard-boiled shamus, though the sleuthing itself is fairly tepid and the solution owes as much to intuition as detection. A moderately successful venture, but bland and tame, especially compared with the likes of Gibson, Jeter, Sterling et al. (Kirkus Reviews)