Altered Carbon (Richard Morgan)

This blend of cyberpunk SF and hardboiled noir detective novel worked for me. Although I sometimes lost the thread of a very complex plot with lots of characters, the strength of the main characters and the fascinating action kept me engaged. Kovacs is a man with many special skills, including guns, martial arts, empathy bordering on psi, and conditioning to deal with blood-freezing torture others would need years of therapy to get over. He is bloodthirsty but also has a core of loyalty and compassion. He lives in a world where people's personal identity can be stored indefinitely and downloaded with ease into a new body, either a synthetic one or one from whom someone else's personality has been extracted. He was put in storage for committing what others defined as a crime, and wakes up on another planet in a strange body, revived by an ancient man of limitless wealth to solve his murder. Along the way he meets whores, drug dealers, prize fighters, cynical police officers, and gangster bosses: all the familiars of detective stories, weirdly morphed by the future they live in. There is a lot of violence, but there's a central humanity that kept it from becoming too dark for me.