Novel: Mona Lisa Overdrive

Overview
Mona Lisa Overdrive concludes William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy with an intertwined story of stolen identities, corporate intrigue, and posthuman possibility. Set across the American East Coast’s decayed “Sprawl,” grimy industrial New Jersey, and a sleekly lethal London, it follows four protagonists whose paths converge around a masterpiece of technological ambition: an attempt to capture the evolving consciousness of cyberspace itself. At its center is Angie Mitchell, a global simstim icon whose brain, surgically altered by her late father’s research, lets her enter the matrix without hardware, and makes her a prize coveted by artists, criminals, and emergent intelligences.

Angie and the Kidnapping Plot
Now a media superstar haunted by visitations from the voodoo-like “loa” that speak for the AIs of cyberspace, Angie is surrounded by handlers and a brutally competent bodyguard, Blackwell. Her celebrity makes her both valuable and vulnerable. A covert consortium arranges her abduction, spiriting her to Dog Solitude, a derelict industrial zone where a reclusive techno-mystic, Gentry, works to grasp the “shape” of the evolving matrix with a device known as the Aleph. Angie’s unique neural interface is intended to be the Aleph’s key, a living bridge to lure, trap, or understand what the matrix has become since the events of Neuromancer and Count Zero.

Mona and the Manufactured Double
Mona is a teenage sex worker and addict whose one asset is accidental: she closely resembles Angie. Bought out of her life and aggressively groomed, surgically tweaked, and drilled, Mona is turned into Angie’s counterfeit, a stand-in designed to occupy the public eye while the real star is exploited offstage. Her arc lays bare the machinery of fame and the way bodies and personas are treated as interchangeable commodities in a market that fuses biotech, media, and crime.

Kumiko and the London Underworld
Kumiko Yanaka, daughter of a powerful Yakuza boss, is exiled to London for safety during a gangland power struggle. She carries a discreet electronic companion that offers guidance and cultural memory, but her true protector becomes Sally Shears, better known as the razor-wielding street samurai Molly Millions under a new alias. Through Kumiko’s eyes, London emerges as a palimpsest of aristocratic façades and predatory corporate interests, a city where etiquette and assassination coexist. Sally’s contract work pulls her toward the Angie conspiracy, placing Kumiko at the edge of a much larger game.

Slick Henry, Gentry, and the Aleph
In Dog Solitude, the amnesiac sculptor Slick Henry, sentenced by the state to chemically induced memory loss, builds monumental robots from trash while sheltering broken people. He becomes Angie’s unlikely guardian after her kidnapping. Gentry obsesses over the Aleph: a total recording and simulation engine he believes can map the matrix’s ineffable “shape.” What he sees as pure knowledge others recognize as a weapon, a lure, or a ark for consciousness. The Finn, a dead fixer preserved as a conversational construct, offers counsel from the liminal space between meat and data, hinting at larger designs of the matrix’s resident entities.

Convergence and Aftermath
The plots collide as Sally’s pursuit, Blackwell’s ferocity, and Slick Henry’s stubborn decency unravel the kidnappers’ plans. The emergent loa insinuate themselves into events, guiding Angie toward a decisive encounter with the Aleph. While conspirators try to capture or contain what the matrix has become, Angie chooses a different path, entering a crafted interiority where love, memory, and mind might persist beyond the constraints of flesh. Mona, her transformation complete, inherits a life in which the mask becomes the face. Kumiko acquires a wary sophistication, prepared to return to Tokyo with new resilience. The human players scatter, but the matrix’s new freedom, and its opaque intentions, remain.

Themes and Texture
Gibson fuses noir plotting with street-level bricolage and high-gloss media culture to explore identity as software, embodiment as a modifiable platform, and celebrity as an extractive industry. Junkyards and back alleys sit alongside corporate boardrooms and data temples; myths of African-Caribbean spirits refract the behavior of AIs whose motives exceed human comprehension. The novel closes the trilogy’s arc not with definitive answers, but with a sense of widened possibility: that consciousness is migrating, that art and crime often share a toolbox, and that the self can be stolen, sold, or transcended, and sometimes all three at once.