If the thrill for you was Case and Molly getting pulled by Armitage/Wintermute into an intricate break-in—from Chiba’s streets to Freeside—then you’ll love the way master thief Jean le Flambeur is sprung from a prison and coerced by Mieli and her ship, Perhonen, into a caper that sprawls across Mars’s Oubliette. The book riffs on the same cyberpunk puzzle-box energy: gevulot privacy protocols echo ICE, social ‘reputation’ economies replace currency, and every job reveals a deeper con. It’s that same hit of high-stakes intrusion, just turned up to far-future eleven.

If you were drawn to Case’s burned-out edge, Molly’s ruthless efficiency, and the way their choices blur lines in the Sprawl and on Freeside, Takeshi Kovacs will feel like home. Hired by ultra-rich Laurens Bancroft, Kovacs body-hops via cortical stacks and tears through a conspiracy that’s as vicious as anything the Tessier-Ashpools cooked up. The fights hit as hard as Molly’s Panther Modern raid, and the ethics slide just as dark—leaving you to weigh survival against soul, one brutal decision at a time.

If Chiba City’s alleys, the Panther Moderns’ chaos, and the sleazy underbelly Case hustles through hooked you, the Budayeen will sink its claws in. Marîd Audran works the streets under crime boss Friedlander Bey while people slot personality ‘moddies’ like software—an echo of Case riding the Dixie Flatline’s construct for skills. The murders are grim, the clubs are dangerous, and every favor comes with a price—capturing that same cigarette-smoked, knife-flash ambiance you felt on the way to Freeside.

If you loved jacking in with Case, the Sprawl’s spiky culture, and Freeside’s corporate weirdness, you’ll devour the Metaverse swordfights of Hiro Protagonist, courier runs with Y.T., and a fractured America carved into franchise city-states. Where ICE and the matrix shaped Case’s reality, here a Sumerian-laced cyber-virus threatens the network itself. It’s the same heady immersion—street slang, hacker cred, corporate feudalism—rendered with blistering scope and verve.

If Wintermute’s manipulations, the Tessier-Ashpool hive, and Case’s uneasy alliance with the Dixie Flatline construct made you chew on identity and autonomy, this will floor you. Paul Durham’s “Copies” run in simulated worlds, testing whether consciousness needs a physical substrate at all, while an ‘Autoverse’ evolves life from code. It pushes the same questions Neuromancer raises—about personhood, free will, and the stakes of liberation—into bracing, mind-bending territory.