I first read Mike McQuay's Swain series a few years after it came out, and I still think it one of the most readable and fun cyber-punk sci-fi series, even though I suspect that the term hadn't yet been invented at the time McQuay wrote the novels.
McQuay clearly modeled his writing style closely on Raymond Chandler's. He captures Chandler's mix of gritty dialog and descriptions coupled with occasional flashes of brilliant similes. The hero, Swain, is a close copy of Chandler's Phillip Marlowe, a knight errant too smart for his own good, who has a gift for pissing off violent people and occasionally getting beat up as a reward for his smart-aleck mouth.
All of the Swain books are fun, but this is the best, a violent and apocalyptic finale to the series, wherein Swain faces a problem far beyond his pay grade: a virus of unknown origin whose effect is to make people so violently paranoid that they turn against each other, then either commit murder or retreat and die, too afraid to eat food that might be poisoned. Where did such a thing come from, and how can even the Twenty-first Century's Toughest Private Eye cope with a danger of such magnitude?
