by William Gibson.

Putnam. 371 pages. $25.95.

BY ANDY SMITH
Journal Staff Writer

William Gibson acquired his initial fame as a science fiction writer. As godfather of the “cyberpunk” movement, he created a hyper, dystopian world of computer mercenaries for whom the virtual world was far more vivid than the steel-gray reality controlled by sinister multinational corporations.

Gibson’s last two books, starting with Pattern Recognition and continuing now with Spook Country, are both set in the present. But if the date has changed, the neighborhood hasn’t — Gibson is still working at the intersection of paranoia and technology.

As in Pattern Recognition, his new novel centers on an intrepid heroine who is recruited by European advertising mogul Hubertus Bigend to uncover a secret.

Bigend, whose Blue Ant agency appears to be nearly omnipotent, is no ordinary ad man. Operating under the philosophy that “secrets are cool,” Bigend tries to crack the world’s deepest mysteries and then figure out how to turn the results into profit.

During an aside, we learn how Bigend manipulated the mysterious Internet footage at the heart of Pattern Recognition in order to sell shoes. It’s Gibson’s reminder that everything we hold sacred is ripe for crass media exploitation.

In Spook Country we meet Hollis Henry, former member of the ’90s cult band Curfew, now working as a journalist for a new European magazine called Node, which may or may not actually exist. Node has assigned Henry to do a story about “locative art,” specifically an artist who re-creates celebrity death scenes in virtual reality at the precise point where they actually happened.

It turns out that Bigend, who owns Node, is using Henry to get close to Bobby Chombo, a Curfew fan and a master of the global positioning used in locative art. Chombo is also tracking a mysterious shipping container wending its way around the world that contains . . . a bomb? Virus? Drugs? Bodies? And that’s just the beginning. It turns out Henry and Bigend are not the only ones looking for the container. The world of Spook Country zooms by in a whirl of conspiracy, action and the occasional visit from voodoo gods.

Gibson is a master of atmosphere, if not character, and reading him invariably provides the pleasure of encountering an interesting mind. Eventually, he brings all the strands of the story together at the port in Vancouver, where the shipping container has finally landed. But when he finally reveals what’s in it, and what happens to it, I found his answers distinctly anticlimactic.

Perhaps he always intended the ride to be more interesting than the destination, but this mostly intriguing book ends with a fizzle.

asmith@projo.com