Halting State

This was brilliantly cool on multiple different levels:

1) The voice. Stross wrote the novel in second-person, and I think it's the only time I've read a second-person novel. It's much more naturalistic and easy to read than your English lit teachers told you it would be.
2) The plot. Bank robberies that happen in the middle of an MMORPG are a fascinating cyberpunk twist on a classic genre and the blending of real-world political implications with game dynamics makes for a really cool story.
3) On a personal level, I was reading this in the immediate post-Brexit aftermath, so the idea of Scotland being independent from England and being in the EU in 2018 was no longer necessarily anachronistic :o) (Seriously, though: internet crime is by nature international, and the difficulty in managing that while working within a nation-state paradigm made for a really interesting plot element)