When Gravity Fails, the first Marid novel, is set in a high-tech near future featuring a divided United States and USSR, a world with mind- or mood-altering drugs for any purpose, brains enhanced by electronic hardware, with plug-in memory additions and modules offering the wearer new personalities (James Bond, celebrities), and bodies shaped to perfection by surgery. Marid Audran, an unmodified and fairly honest street survivor, lives in a decadent Arab ghetto, the Budayeen, and against his best instincts, becomes involved in a series of inexplicable murders. Some seem like routine assassinations, carried out with an old-fashioned handgun by a man wearing a plug-in James Bond persona; other 9781497605404