"Rule 34" Charles Stross

According to Wikipedia, that source of all knowledge,  the title is a reference to the meme Rule 34 of the Internet, a meme which states that "If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions."  The connection with the story is that Liz heads up a cop shop dedicated to trolling cyberspace for illegal porn and related activities.  She doesn't want to be there, and there seems to be a back story to why she isn't something like Chief of Police by now, but we are not let in on the secret.

Like many books I have read, this is a police procedural.  It seems to be my year of police procedurals set in strange settings, and the strange setting here is a futuristic world that sounds all too plausible.  Vertical farms, in-home 3-D printers, smarter and smarter spam software, cops with virtual sit-rooms projected onto the inside of their wrap-around sunglasses, and phone receivers in your head.

The story is told in second person, as if someone is telling everyone what to do, or explaining to them later what they did.  Most people I mentioned this to said that it would be annoying.  I didn't find it annoying, but wondered if it served a purpose....

Okay, there is something about a crime syndicate, a puppet country set up to help the financial situation of the parent country, biological beings that can be brewed up in a vat.  This all leads to a series of murders across the British Isles and in Europe.  The question is how is all this connected, or does it connect at all.  Liz has to work with an international team, including a man named Kemel, who she has worked with before, and of course, despises.

I read in the front cover of the book that this is the second in a series.  I know I haven't read the first in the series, "Halting State," but I hoped the first book would fill in some details in Liz and Kemel's past experiences together, or why Liz was relegated to a scummy job.  But, the main characters are Sue, Jack and Elaine and it is about a virtual bank robbery.  The crime story fits, but I'm still not quite sure how these books are related enough to be called a series.  Sadly, I was not enamored with the characters, story or plot devices in "Rule 34" to get me to look up the previous book. Neither was my roommate.  Like many books like this, I love to hear the details of the world the people live in, and get to know the characters, but the story here was not really enough to keep me interested.  I might get "Halting State" for the roommate if I run across it at a book sale, but I'm not putting it on his wish list for him.