Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
Altered Carbon is compulsively readable. It's fast-paced, full of sex and violence, and just grabbed my attention.
Kovacs is our rather hard-boiled detective. He's is a loner with a tendency to violence and a willingness to do whatever he needs to, legal or otherwise. He is also more than willing to take "justice" into his own hands and wracks up a body count to prove it. He also has a softer side that only shows up rarely. He was killed on another world and re-sleeved in Bay City in the body of a disgraced cop. People's personalities, souls, consciousness, whatever you want to call it, are digitized and can be downloaded into new bodies with the right reasons or enough cash. Kovac's has one mission: find out who killed Laurens Bancroft, a Meth (short for Methusaleh) billionaire. Bancroft is offering Kovacs some money and more importantly his freedom as a reward. Only a lot of people don't seem to want...