Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Despite being a Peter F. Hamilton fan, I have a confession to make – I never could get into the Reality Dysfunction. I loved the tech, I thought the characters were great, I just couldn’t wrap my brain around the dead coming back through a dimensional rift. It just smacked of cheesy, especially when Al Capone made his appearance.
I started the Great Road North was some trepidation – Hamilton can be hit or miss in my experience – and was pleased to find a good story, if a touch repetitive of previous works. Hamilton has returned to the kind of story that made Paula Myo so awesome. Blending crime and aliens is a successful formula for Hamilton, so it’s only natural that he would return to those roots in this story. The setting for this tale is familiar – set a century or so into the future, the advent of a portal technology has allowed man to spread across the galaxy. At the pinnacle of the economic paradise are the North’s, a family of successive generations of clones. When a North washes up dead, it’s big news. When it’s the second clone to be murdered in a uniquely grisly way in twenty years, and the last suspect was an alien with knives for fingers, things begin to get interesting.
Hamilton deftly weaves together the stories of Sid, a Newcastle detective on the trail of a murderer, and Angela, the sole surviving witness of the first encounter, 9 light years from Earth on the trail of the alien monster that no one else believes exists. Hamilton litters the page with a small supporting cast that are rarely thin or cardboard, and always seem to offer us a little more insight into our main characters.
The only fault I have with the novel is that we’ve been here before. This isn’t the Commonwealth, and these aren’t the same characters, but the themes are reminiscent of Hamilton’s other books. A great read, and definitely fills an itch for a space opera with killer monsters, but not his best.
