Ken Barnes of "USA Today" found that "[l]andscapes, events and points of view shift constantly, so that the reader never truly feels on solid ground", but judged the novel to be a "vivid, suspenseful and ultimately coherent tale". In a review for "The Washington Post", Bill Sheahan hailed the novel's capture of the zeitgeist, and compared it to the acclaimed literary fiction of Don DeLillo:  Ed Park of the "Los Angeles Times" hailed the novel as a "puzzle palace of bewitching proportions and stubborn echoes", noting the fact that antihero Hubertus Bigend was the most prominent link to "Pattern Recognition" as "deliciously sinister". Tim Martin thought that the plot lacked direction at times. Although he conceded that the novel's main Henry/Bigend storyline felt lightweight, Matt Thorne writing in "The Independent" conjectured that it was part of Gibson's conscious design that that thread "plays out against a backdrop of hidden machinations that have a much darker, wider resonance". Thorne declared "Spook Country" a more substantial novel than its predecessor on this basis. John Casimir of "The Sydney Morning Herald" concurred, writing that despite the similarity in the plots of the novels, the narrative foundation of the later novel was firmer, its structure "more sophisticated" and its "seams less visible". Ed Park singled out the author's prose for praise, proclaiming that "[s]entence for sentence, few authors equal Gibson's gift for the terse yet poetic description, the quotable simile – people and products are nailed down with a beautiful precision approximating the platonic ideal of the catalog". Matt Thorne noted that while he found Gibson's tendency towards hyper-specificity initially irritating, "there's hypnotic quality to the relentless cataloguing". The author's prose was also extolled by Clay Evans of the "Daily Camera", and by Benjamin Lytal in "The New York Sun", who declared that "the real news, in "Spook Country", is that much of the flair that Mr. Gibson once brought to descriptions of cyberspace seems to fit perfectly, now, on all kinds of things." In "The Seattle Times", Nisi Shawl gushed that "[e]ven without the high cool quotient of the novel's contents, the pleasure of Gibson's prose would be enough inducement for most of us to immerse ourselves in this book..." Simon Cooper of "The Book Show" agreed with the commendations of Gibson's prose, but felt the plot and characterization let the book down: In a review for "The Providence Journal", Andy Smith remarked that the author was "a master of atmosphere, if not character" – a sentiment echoed by "The Post and Courier"s Dan Conover, who, although praising the novel's intelligence and contemporary relevance, felt that Gibson's underlying political pre-occupation and detached narration came at the expense of character development.