‘Spook Country, its title a reference to the fact that this it is supposed to be a spy novel, is set in the same world as Gibson’s previous novel Pattern Recognition and, much like that book, is centered upon a female character with a first name that could equally be a surname and a brief to investigate something from an advertising mogul.  A former musician turned journalist for a non-existent magazine entitled Node (intended to be a European version of Wired), Hollis Henry is hired to write a piece about people making VR art installations but before long she is hired to discover the contents of a shipping container that the US government wants to keep hidden. Indeed, in another of the book’s thread a descendent of Cuban emigres is hired to transport an iPod that contains encrypted data while an American agent and his comical medicated interpreter (the protagonists from the book’s third thread) try and track the iPod down while a hacker and VR art producer (as opposed to artist) tries to stay one step ahead of them all.

(…)

It’s no accident that Spook Country references Wired almost immediately as Wired, as a lifestyle magazine, is specifically tailored not to the people who live the lifestyle depicted in Spook Country (there aren’t enough of them to support a magazine, even one as full of adverts as Wired) but rather the people who wish they lived that lifestyle. Wired’s pages are full of adverts for high-end technology that you “need” from TVs to games consoles to business hotels with free WiFi and films on demand. Spook Country’s world is as aspitational as that of Wired.’

— Jonathan McCalmont, ‘William Gibson is a Cunt (but not in the way you think)’, SFDiplomat, 29/10/2007