2009 science fiction, second of a trilogy. Ariane Kedros was involved
in finding an alien artefact that lots of people want a look at. Some
of them aren't planning to be polite.
I enjoyed this rather more than the first volume; while there are
machinations continuing in the background, the major thrust of the
plot deals with hijacking and nuclear terrorism (though the nukes of
this setting are "temporal distortion" weapons). As a middle volume it
inserts something close to a stand-alone story between the large-scale
plot events of books 1 and (I assume) 3, while still contributing a
bit to the larger narrative.
It is a little unfortunate that the terrorists are also fundamentalist
male-supremacist peculators; they're too obviously Bad Guys to be
interesting as characters, even the one who's having second thoughts
and is drawn with a little sophistication. Other characters are more
interestingly complex, with enemies who may be forced to cooperate for
now but who are most definitely going to stay enemies afterwards;
better, each viewpoint character has a distinct voice.
The actual layout of this solar system isn't always as clear as it
might be, particularly in terms of which places are connected to each
other, and one finds some of the complacency on display hard to take
seriously, but things more or less hold together. Neither that nor the
action distracts from the stories of multiple interesting people,
which are the key thing here.
After a slowish start there's a fair bit of action, combined with the
effective use of real military detail that Reeve (with a background as
an actual USAF officer) manages to translate effectively into an SFnal
setting.
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