Void Star is classic cyberpunk, dense and evocative without being a Gibsonian pastiche.

Irina is an AI whisperer, a unique talent with an implant that gives her perfect recall and the ability to link directly with computers. Kern is a favela slum-dweller, an autodidact martial artist seeking a warrior's perfect discipline. Thales is a damaged young man, the son of an assassinated politician who's health is balanced on the same kind of implant Irina has, but his is failing.

Irina and Kern both take ordinary kinds of jobs; Irina to debug an AI that has become abstracted from the will of its corporate master, immensely rich aspiring immortal Cromwell, and Kern to snatch a cellphone from a man in the San Francisco favela. These jobs draw them into an immense web of technological intrigue and sudden violence, involving AI, immortality, and absolute power.

The standout in this book is the prose: densely textured eyeball kicks in the finest tradition of the genre. This world, of buzzing drones, mutable favelas, private spa clinics, life extension as treadmill installment plan, powered armor guards at the gates of cities which have broken free of nations, drowned cities, abandoned mega-projects, underground fighting rings, all of has great imagination and specificity. I have high, but not infinite tolerance for dense and abstruse jargon and shifting points of view, and while Mason pushed my tolerances, he never abused it.