When Gravity Fails is the best hardboiled cyberpunk you've never read. Marid Audran is a small-time hustler and fixer in the Budayeen, a red light district in an unnamed Arab city somewhere along the Mediterranean coast in the 23rd century. People still want the same old stuff, mostly sex and drugs, but the big technology is neural implants that give people temporary short-term knowledge and artificial personalities. Marid doesn't use them. His vanity is that he floats above the streets, that his natural brain is more than a match for the amped up thugs and prostitutes.

When his clients, friends, and other street figures begin dying, assassinated by a mysterious person wearing a James Bond personality, and an absolutely bastard of a psychopath, Marid has to track down the killer, and compromise every single one of his values and relationships in the service of Friedlander Bey, the crimelord who runs the Budayeen.

What's probably the best part of this book is how resolutely queer it is. It must have been supremely trangressive when published, and remains provocative today. Effinger based the Budayeen on the French Quarter in New Orleans, before it became a tourist theme park. The exotic dancers, bartenders, and prostitutes are treated with a surprising degree of tenderness. Marid's girlfriend is a trans woman, the whole Budayeen packed with people who have remade their bodies and minds in search of their better selves.