Just read: "Altered Carbon" by Richard K. Morgan
Wow.  Somehow I managed to miss the insanely talented Richard K. Morgan for all these years.  I finally decided to give his novels a try after he joined my discussion group.  His posts and opinions were frank and harsh, generally commonsensical and, amazingly, just about about as negative and dark and cynical as my own.  Or to quote the author:  "Society is, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an élite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by a willful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the very majority whom the system oppresses." 
The main reason I never tried his works before is some very negative feedback from my group's members when we read and discussed his first novel "Altered Carbon".  The negative feedback was mainly because of the fact that the novel contains lots of harsh violence and, to a lesser degree, some explicit sex scenes.
Yep, well, that's all true.  The novel is dark, gritty, violent, harsh, dark, negative, dystopian, cynical, did I mention dark?  It's also utterly excellent.  It's got the same noir sensibility as William Gibson's first novels, but it's more extreme. 
In the future, it has become possible to store personalities digitally and download them into new bodies.  As a result, very rich people can practically live forever, "resleeving" into new bodies as needed.  In the absence of faster-than-light travel, it's now also possible to have your personality transmitted to another world to find life in another body.  Because the cost is prohibitive for most, this privilege is reserved for the rich and powerful.  The novel's fascinating protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, is a former UN Envoy (combination of Navy Seal and uber-spy), who is revived from imprisonment to try and solve the murder of Laurens Bancroft, one of the very rich and powerful on Earth.  The resulting story, technically a very complicated whodunnit, is one of the tightest and most exciting SF novels I've read in a while.
Morgan's writing style is an interesting blend of traditional noir and ultra-realistic action movie.  His descriptions of violence are somehow both semi-detached and painfully intense, resulting in a strange, harsh clarity that really drives the power of the events home.  The world-building is subtle, resulting in some pleasant disorientation at first (similar to being resleeved?), but also hinting at big chunks of history that can still be revealed in later novels.  There are two more novels featuring Takeshi Kovacs, both of which are already on my TBR pile.  "Altered Carbon" gets 4 stars and a strong recommendation for anyone who enjoyed early William Gibson and dark, dystopian SF in general.

Next up, however:  "Memo to the President-Elect", by Madeleine Albright.