In the near future, nearly everyone in the world is equipped with an Ego: “a neural augmentation device” that can tap into people’s senses and perceptions, developed by the Arc Corporation and mainly used for high-tech virtual-reality games. Arc has extensive contracts with the military and government and seems to be untouchable, until a series of Arc employees are mysteriously murdered, which places the company at the center of a case led by Det. Nate Wartman of the Corporate Bureau of Investigation. While looking for clues at an Arc facility, Nate forms an unexpected alliance with Pol Haff, a renegade Arc engineer who’s willing to go to extreme measures to find the truth about what happened to his friends. Together, they become embroiled in a dangerous VR arms race between Arc and its biggest rival, Mee Corp., as the two companies fight to achieve “digital immortality” via the next generation of neural implants. Nate and Pol embark on an investigation that takes them from an underground data center in the Arizona desert to a luxury mansion in the hills of South Korea—and it’s a journey that transforms them into international fugitives. Along the way, they’re guided by intelligence gained by CBI “VR diver” Jane, as well as coded messages from the digital “ghost” of late Arc founder Peter Green. Ra’s detailed rendering of the tech world of the future over the course of this novel is colorful and entertaining and, notably, less bleak than many readers might expect. The characters, however, feel underdeveloped and start to seem interchangeable as they become increasingly entangled in a whirlwind plot. Without strong main players to effectively ground the story, the vivid fictional world, and its complicated corporate-espionage plot, will leave many readers feeling dizzy and unmoored—as if they’re on an extended jaunt in VR themselves.