Just finished up Halting State by Charlie Stross.
The hook is that there's a robbery in a virtual world, a bank heist in a fantasy MMO -- something that should be impossible and requires a major hack of the game. Contrary to the "bank robbery, but with orcs and dragons!" setup, it's not as wacky or as fun as the Laundry novels, it's straight-up hard, not-too-distant-future SF; William Gibson didn't get the cover blurb just because he's a name.
Charlie's not faking it, either; he's got a CS degree and when he looks at what MMORPG's and AR could be like a decade from now, he's not just playing with the "OMG there are terrorists in Second Life!" media sensationalism (though that DOES form a big part of the basis of the book), he's got a very thorough technical explanation for how his world works, in terms of clients, servers, authentication, distributed networking, and dev tools. But most importantly, he understands the relationship between gamers and games.
And therein lies the book's most interesting conceit: it's told in the second person, in present tense, and the POV rotates among three different principal characters. It's a book about role-playing games where you, the reader, play the roles of the three main characters. And he very deliberately starts off with Sue, a lesbian cop with a ridiculous Scottish accent and the character who has the least in common with the target audience of the book, and introduces Jack, the recently-unemployed game designer, last.
I don't know how much a layman would enjoy the book -- he throws out jargon like "griefing" and "digital signing" without explanation (or a glossary like in the Laundry books) -- but that contributes to the feeling that hey, this book is for us.
Also, he's got a sequel coming called Rule 34.
