Mona Lisa Overdrive

the final book in the Sprawl-trilogy reunites us with Molly Millions and other characters from the previous two books...

short plot description: set after the events in "Count Zero" we follow several seemingly unrelated plots. Kumiko Yanaka is the daughter of a yakuza boss and send to London to get her out of harms way. There she meets an older Molly Millions who is blackmailed into kidnapping Angie Mitchell, now a famous SimStim-star with a drug problem. Slick Henry is a convicted criminal-turned-artist with a memory problem who gets pressured into taking care of Bobby Newmark, who hooked himself fulltime into a gigantic ram-construct nicknamed Aleph. Mona is a naive street prostitute working for a low-life pimp with grand plans....

my thoughts: more complex and character-driven than Gibson's previous novels. The new characters are interesting, the established characters are getting more depth, nothing really new is added to the world of the Sprawl.
Gibson has settled into his style, we see the events through several points of view, most notably we get this time two innocent/naive views through the eyes of Kumiko, who is young and for the first time outside of Japan and Mona who hasn't seen much outside her narrow circle of street crime, bars and prostitution.
The plot feels to me a bit like an afterthought, it is as if Gibson wanted to be finished with this whole AI-in-Cyberspace thing and is more interested in the characters and moving on to more interesting things.
Still a very strong novel, especially the parts written from Kumiko's point of view.

my advice: should be hard to read as a stand-alone novel, too many characters and events from the previous novels have to be known for the plot to make sense. Start with "Neuromancer" and if you don't like "Count Zero" don't bother with this book.