Altered Carbon is the latest scifi novel to make the leap to the small screen, with a gorgeous adaptation by Netflix. But this isn't about the show, this is about the book.

Takeshi Kovacs is an ex-Envoy, member of an interstellar police force turned criminal turned prisoner. His world is defined by the technology of DHF, minds stored on tiny chips implanted in the skull and bodies reduced to "sleeves". Most people just get the body they're born with, but if you're rich enough you can have entire tanks of clones or just buy new flesh from someone who's fucked up and put their mind on ice. Kovacs is called back to the world by Laurens Bancroft, an effectively immortal super rich dude who blew his own head off a few weeks prior. Cops are treating it as a badly done suicide (why would someone with backups shoot themselves without erasing the backups?), but Bancroft thinks it was murder, and wants Kovacs' Envoy skills to find the true killer.

The story loops Kovacs through the criminal underworld of San Francisco, trouble with mistaken identity (his current body used to belong to a dirty cop), and a confrontation with an enemy out of the past, Reileen Kawahara, a powerful criminal who runs high-end brothels. In a world where any sin is available for enough money, Reileen has the ultimate illegal kick, snuffing prostitutes who will really die, because she's forged a "Do Not Resuscitate" order on the basis of their Catholic faith. With a bill coming through that'd allow resurrection in pursuit of criminal inquiry, Kawahara needed leverage on Bancroft, and had him kill one of her girls with the assistance of Bancroft's jealous wife. Grand plots of politics work down to sordid little personal conflicts. Forget it, Jake, it's cyberpunk neo-noir.

Morgan leavens up the standard cyberpunk tropes with references to poet and philosopher of revolution Falconer Quell, and he has an eye for action, but I can't say this book is more than the sum of it's bricolaged parts. And I will say that while this is the show bleeding over, this book is weird about women and women's bodies, and not in a particularly elegant or pointed way.