After I finished the four Laundry Files books I was ready for more Stross, so I took on the two Halting State books, Halting State and Rule 34. What they share in common is the adventures of Scottish police detectives in Edinburgh in a near future society. The police are insanely high tech with virtual reality eyeglasses and "lifelogging" cameras, and it's entertaining to read the technological future he envisions. Stross is incredibly creative, and it's a pleasure to read his work, although these books are marginally more difficult to translate because there's so much Scottish accented speech and slang. Not even to be a problem, but it does slow the reader a bit. Ruler 34 is the second novel chronologically, but they're essentially separate stories and can be read out of sequence, which I accidentally did, without risk to life or limb.
The first book is a story told from three alternating viewpoints, so depending on who's narrating, it's an online gaming mystery as well as a police thriller, while the second novel is just the police story. What's odd about both is that they are told from the second person view, i.e. "You walk into the room and see so and so. Hello, you say, looking around to see if the light switch is close to you." The particular problem with this is that the reader isn't told, except in the chapter title and in any responsive dialogue using proper nouns, who the hell "you" are. That's particularly problematic because the story is told from multiple characters' viewpoint, and since it's several chapters into the book before you can keep characters straight, it's a confusing device.
Now if the entire story was told in the second person by one character, it would be fine - it'd be the same thing as first person - but when switching viewpoints the loss of repeated proper nouns makes it hard to follow - it's like watching TV with your eyes closed. It's a credit to Stross that I didn't get so frustrated that I put the thing down. I will say that if you get the characters straight going in, say by reviewing the a back-cover summary or the wiki of the book - it'd be much easier. Would be the difference between listening to an episode of Castle and listening to an episode of a similar police thrilleryou've seen before.
Really good books, though. Very interesting contrasting a near-future Scotland with ubiquitous surveillance with current-day U.S.
