A SciFi murder mystery. Very odd, interesting. Lots of tech and complex plot. ( )

Action galore: the hero (a former commando) has a glandular implant that lets him sense other people's emotions and is helping the richest man in the world save his company against some of the smartest power grabbers in the world. Hamilton's tendency for elaborate scene descriptions is continued here--with a little bit more restraint than in some others of his books--the mind numbing descriptions of future technology is minimized. The story flows, and ebbs, and then picks up real steam as he gets closer to "the truth". Fortunately, his old friends are smart enough to save him in the end. Pay attention in the first chapter...because it's clarified many chapters later, and serves to explain his dedication to his friends-and vice versa: "absolution" is the key word.

This story also manages to include a lot of cyber punk, without creating a new vocabulary for us to wade through. However, it's helpful to have access to an on-line dictionary of British slang--it's not critical, but, as someone who's lived in England, I definitely noticed a number of British speech forms that might otherwise go unnoticed as "writing style"...and a few words that are definitely not Americanisms ("spivy", "scrumping"). ( )

Hamilton, Peter F. Mindstar Rising. 1993. Greg Mandel No. 1. Tor, 1997.
Peter F. Hamilton is best known for his sprawling, epic far-future space operas, but in the early Greg Mandel series he showed that he could write an effective 400-page near-future novel as well. In Mindstar Rising, we learn that much of coastal England has been flooded by global warming, wreaking the expected havoc on the English and world economies. England has also recently been at war with Turkey, and our hero, Greg Mandel, is one of its black-ops veterans. He has been given a bio-engineered gland that turns him into a human lie-detector. It will probably give him cancer in the long run, but in the meantime, it makes him a superb private investigator. He is just the guy to investigate high-tech corporate espionage in your orbital factory. It is surprising how little the book has dated in seventeen years. Recommended. Note: In case you cannot take Hamilton in less than 800-page doses, the first two novels in the series have been published as The Mandel Files, Volume 1. ( )

Peter F. Hamilton's debut novel is an entertaining thriller set in a near future where global warming, a Credit Crash and far left wing totalitarianism wrecked the British economy, Scotland has become independent and Wales gets no mention at all.... England's recovery from all of this is underway but it's fragile and many are still living under the influence of gangs and corruption.
The protagonist, a war vet with medically boosted empathy and intuition, is hired by the hi-tech company leading the way in dragging the economy forward out of egrarianism and bartering to solve a case of industrial espionage and illegal spoiler tactics.
It is a straightforward narrative that soon grips and is not bloated. Fun and followed by two sequels involving the same protagonists. Readers of the Night's Dawn trilogy or the Commonwealth Saga will find this something of a stylistic contrast. ( )

After greatly enjoying Peter Hamilton's The Reality Dysfunction, the first volume of his Night's Dawn trilogy, I wanted to read more about this author, but without committing to one of his more "monstrous" novels yet, and I settled for Mindstar Rising, again a first volume in a trilogy and, from what I understand, Hamilton's first published novel.

The setting of this story is very interesting:


Continue reading over at SPACE and SORCERY BLOG ( )