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Charles Stross set himself an unusual gauntlet with Halting State: write a near-future techno-thriller, set it in a newly independent Scotland circa 2018, hinge the entire plot on a bank robbery committed by orcs inside an MMORPG, and narrate the whole thing in second-person present tense across three rotating viewpoints. That it works at all is remarkable. That it mostly works very well is a testament to how sharply Stross understands the strange territory he is mapping.

The premise sounds absurd - a dragon-accompanied raiding party hits the vaults of Avalon Four, and a bewildered Edinburgh sergeant gets the call - but the absurdity is the point. Virtual goods are worth real money, those monies sit on real stock markets, and a plausible theft inside a game engine can send shockwaves through actual economies. From this opening, the novel pivots cleanly from farce into fraud, from fraud into murder, and from murder into a full-blown info-war between Europe, China and India. I found the escalation exhilarating for about two-thirds of the book. The final act, where British intelligence fronts and weaponised ARGs pile on top of the core mystery, is the one stretch where the engine over-revs. Stross has so many good ideas he seems reluctant to leave any out, and the plot pays for it.

Where the novel truly earns its keep is in the economic and social texture. The portrait of game economies as financial infrastructure, of networked surveillance as routine civic plumbing, of augmented-reality overlays redrawing police work in real time, is observed with the precision of someone who has actually written code for a living. The idea of CopSpace, where officers view the world through a live layer of crime data and identity flags, has only grown more prescient with age. Edinburgh itself is rendered with affection and specificity, and the Scots dialect peppered through the dialogue gives the book a rhythm you settle into quickly.

The three protagonists - Sue the cop, Elaine the forensic accountant, Jack the laid-off games programmer - are sketched efficiently rather than richly. Elaine is the most interesting of them, Jack leans hardest on the familiar geek-archetype beat, and Sue holds the police-procedural spine of the book together. The second-person narration is the single biggest risk on the page. For the first fifty pages it felt gimmicky; by the midpoint I had stopped noticing; by the end I could see how it mimics the you-are-here grammar of the games the book is really about. Your mileage will vary, and some will never make peace with it.

The jargon density and the parade of knowing abbreviations will delight some and exhaust others. I sat closer to the delighted end, but I can see the fatigue. Halting State is not quite the masterpiece it occasionally threatens to become, and its 2018 has been overtaken by real history in odd places, yet it remains one of the sharpest near-future thrillers of its decade and a genuinely original piece of speculative crime fiction.