This was billed to me as 'Thatcherite science fiction' and I avoided it for a long time. That was my mistake (avoiding the book, that is, rather than avoiding Thatcherism). The book is well-written, with an excellent sense of place and a fine ability to move the action along. A friend who comes from the Fens applauded the Eastern English setting, even though the landscape in the novel is transformed by global warming and rising sea levels. ( )

Psychic corporate sleuthing.

Greg Mandel is literally a psychic detective, an ability given to him via technology and a stint in the military. So not a psychic detective in the ghost busting sense, at all.

This very nasty far left government has since collapsed, leaving old pommieland in a semi-parlous rebuilding situation.

Mandel is hired to look into both thefts, and attacks on a digital personality, via that personalities granddaughter.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2007/12... ( )

ZB5

Peter F. Hamilton is for me the single most important reason for my return to reading for pleasure, after the adverse effects of years of academic research.Since the main character is an ex-serviceman, the dialogue is often terse, hard, laconic, and the action correspondingly brutal but Hamilton within this bunker of a short novel manages to capture the higher emotional undercurrents that do swirl under the culture of reserve that (still) marks present-day England as much as it does this imagined progeny of Albion - loyalty, determination and an unassailable moral duty to do right, despite appearances and the formal claims of established order. ( )

Good read. I will finish reading the series. ( )