Just like its title, The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse, by Keith Hartman, is an overstuffed novel. There are something like 15 point-of-view characters, sci-fi, witches, shamans, a mystery, social commentary, and so on.
The different pieces were mostly enjoyable, but they pull in so many directions that none of them really shines, and some really suffer. For example, there's a whole sub-plot with Indian magic, and our gumshoe is set to be the next shaman, but it doesn't really go anywhere. There are a few other similarly abandoned plots, which is just not good in a sprawling novel like this.
The other issue I had with the novel is that it feels very contemporary for a novel set 30 years in the future. You could strip out the science fiction and the magic, and the resulting novel would be almost the same, except for the very end.
I think I might have enjoyed this novel more if it had been shorter. At 430 trade paperback-size pages, it just dragged by the end.
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