I heard about this book twice at WisCon.

I just finished reading Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon and it was pretty awesome. It was his first novel yet doesn't read like one. It's a lovely cross between a hardboiled detective novel and a Philip K. Dick-ish dystopian what-makes-humans-human sci-fi novel. The premise is pretty simple - in the future, humans can download their consciousness and put it into computers or other bodies or whatever. Because of this, if you have enough money, you never have to die. You can just back-up or transfer your consciousness into another body. So, guy gets killed, gets his backed-up consciousness back into a new body, but it's an old back-up, like 48 hours old, so he doesn't remember who killed him. The other problem is that it looks like suicide. So, guy hires a detective to find out who killed him. Okay, mabybe the premise isn't so simple but it was awesome.