In a world caught up in the grip of information overload, where artificial intelligence is more than the real thing and cyborg cops spend their lives surfing on an electronic sea of living data, only the Ghost - the indefinable element of human consciousness - exists to determine who is alive and who is purely a creation of the Net.
Major Motoko Kusanagi is an elite officer in Shell Squad, the Section 9 security force: a cybermetic agent so heavily modified that little more than her Ghost remains. Along with fellow cyborg Bateau and the mostly human Tosuga, Kusanagi is set on the trail of a computer-criminal known as the Puppet Master, a datathief skilled enough th hack into the very minds of his victims. His human marionettes live out existences that are nothing mre than computer-generated fantasy, unwittingly commiting their masters crimes while the Ghost-hacker hides in the darkness.
But as Kusanagi digs deeper into the walls of secrecy surrounding the case, it appears that the Puppet Master has a special interest in her alone. And when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, shadowy Section 6, enter the scene, webbing her in a tangle of plot and counter plot, Kusanagi realises that the true identity of her invisible assailant lies at the centre of a vast and lethal political conspiracy...

Seamlessly merging traditional cel animation with the latest computer graphic imagery, Ghost in the Shell is a complex an violent cyberspace adventure from Masamune Shirow - creator of Appleseed and Dominion Tank Police.