Description

In 2411, death is not forever. Afterward, they can read your personality from an implanted “cortical stack” and upload you into a new body–at a price. Hero Kovacs has worn many bodies on different worlds as a former member of the UN Envoy Corps, programmed killers to a man. Now the incredibly rich Bancroft brings him to Earth to investigate a killing… of Bancroft himself, restored from his digital backup and rejecting the police theory of suicide.

Half the vice-lords of 25th-century San Francisco are soon chasing Kovacs with futuristic surveillance, drugs and weaponry. Virtual-reality interrogation means they can torture you to death, and then start again. There’s a bleak slave trade in rented or confiscated bodies–and Kovacs finds his current borrowed face is all too well known to both police and underworld.