Rydell is on his way back to San Francisco. A stint as a security man in a Los Angeles convenience store has convinced him his career is going nowhere, but his friend phoning from Tokyo, says there's more interesting work for him in Northern California. And there is.William Gibson's seventh glossy, neon-lit novel is a stylishly complex sequel to his previous two, Virtual Light and Idoru. From Virtual Light there's the potent image of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge transformed into a vertically stacked shanty-town with its own bohemian autonomy, outside the law. Idoru provides the magical Japanese media idol ("idoru") Rei Toei, a gorgeous lady existing only in software--as yet. Gibson links these worlds with his usual glowing, plausible vision of deadly streetwise realities intersecting with on-line data flow. One man attuned to the net can sense from his cardboard-box home in Tokyo that major changes loom. A Zen assassin stalks San Francisco and the unlucky ex-cop hero from Virtual Light must assemble some very strange equipment. Further objects of desire include lovingly described knives, guns and even antique mechanical watches, as collected by Gibson himself (who pursues them through online auctions)--the ability to trace watches across the net is crucial to tracking the arch-villain. All the world's clocks are ticking in a countdown to transformation and to chrome-polished scenes of extreme violence as zero-hour nears. Multiple storylines meet and dovetail with deft, witty understatement and, in one case, a charming joke. Vintage Gibson, with enough artful backfill that you needn't read the prequels--but they're great fun too. --David Langford