One day the daughter of a mafia boss decides to make something of her (thus far) wastrel life and sets herself on a task of seemingly gargantuan proportion, and so begins the creation of New Venice, an artificially created city in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

A century after its creation and New Venice has settled into a city comprising two worlds. The exceptional opulence of the higher echelons of the giant corporations and the more gritty, harder edge of The Levels.

Aurelio is the ten year old boss of the giant Media Corp CySat. Razz is his enhanced bodyguard, whose last memory before dying is an assassin closing in on the child she should be protecting. When she wakes up in a new (sixteen year old, un-enhanced) body she determines to uncover why the child was attacked. And she will use any means necessary to achieve this goal.

Lucifer's Dragon from the books title is a computer game, based on an artificial intelligence. If you manage to beat it once then it will learn and the same moves will not work a second time.

I am not a great fan of cyberpunk novels, which did mean I was a little hesitant before picking it up. I need not have worried for, although this does indeed contain a large number of cyberpunk elements it does not do it at the expense of the story.

These elements are introduced into the story in a good way. In this world Microsoft make an operating system for pilotless helicopters and Colt manufacture Pulse Rifles. This blending of the familiar from our current world into the future presented by Grimwood and makes this take on cyberpunk a good deal more palatable to the non-fan than some others.

This was a book that reminded me in some places of Philip K. Dick and in others of William Gibson, although throughout Grimwood manages to plot his own course, utilising the familiarity science fiction readers have with sf concepts and our knowledge of this world to complete the picture he sketches, without his overburdening the progression of the story with the intricacies of his world.

This is cyberpunk done friendly, and above all else it is a very strongly plotted science ficiton novel and shows the man's talent as a writer.

Synopsis
Passion di Orchi is no more then the obscenely rich daughter of a West Coast mafia boss - until she decides to rebuild Venice...

...in the middle of the Pacific.

A century later, with New Venice ossified into a puritanical elegance, the daughter of Count Ryuchi slips away from her father's palazzo, out to the levels to play Lucifer's Dragon. A multi-level self-perpetuating, true 3-D trawl through the apocalypse, Lucifer's Dragon is coded so the game never repeats its own failures. But an altercation in a bar puts Karo on a collision course with NVPD officer Angeli, drafted in by media giant CySat to investigate a murder she knows way too much about.

And then there's Razz, the silver exotic. Too tired and jaded to keep living, she takes on the job of guarding CySat's ultimate boss, the ten-year-old Aurelio. with all the high tech security in place, it should be a walk in the park. But the last thing Razz sees is CySat's child-ruler making too close an auquaintance with an Uzi, and then she wakes up in Zurich. Dead...