Halting State

In a near-future independent Scotland, a heist takes place inside Avalon Four, a massively multiplayer online game, when a band of orcs and a dragon rob a player bank of assets worth a fortune in real currency. Police sergeant Sue Smith catches the case, forensic accountant Elaine Barnaby is sent by the game company's insurers, and burned-out programmer Jack Reed gets pulled in to explain how the impossible theft worked. What looks like in-game fraud quickly turns into corporate espionage, augmented-reality spycraft, and a threat to national security tangled up with quantum computing. Stross writes the whole thing in second person, rotating between his three leads, building a procedural that treats virtual economies and gaming infrastructure as deadly serious business.