[amazon_link id=”034552666X” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][/amazon_link]Title : Great North Road
Author : Peter F. Hamilton
Genre : Sci-fi, Mystery
Publisher : Tor
Pages : 1089
Source : Netgalley/ Publisher ARC
Rating : 2.5/5

Before I requested this book on NetGalley I did a quick net lookup on Peter Hamilton – I hadn’t read him before. General reviews were good. I’m guessing then that I’m in the minority because I don’t quite get this book. It is a tome, and I didn’t realize this since I normally don’t pay attention to pages when I read – especially on the kindle, where all I see is the percentage read. With Great North Road, I would read and read and discover that I’d read maybe only a couple of percent, so I looked up the book specifications. This one has close to 1100 pages!

With a book of this length one would expect some rambling prose. And that’s true here – it rambles on for about the 1st third – progress so glacial that I was tempted to just thrust it in my “not-finished” pile. I persevered by skipping through arduous pedantic descriptions of police work.

“Great North Road” is a mix of sci-fi and murder mystery. It is set in the future when the world has run out of natural energy sources and now depends on “bioil” produced by the algae-paddies of St.Libra, a planet accessible via a spatial gateway. The earth is now connected to many planets this way, courtesy the technological innovations of the Norths – a great family of clones. The original North makes 3 clones of himself (2Norths), and then they are further cloned (3Norths) etc. All North clones look and seem alike. When a North is found dead, floating in the Tune river, there is great pressure to find the killer.

This task falls to Detective Sid Hurst, who plods along in the absence of clues. The North is unidentifiable; no North clone has been reported missing. Moreover death has occurred via what looks like to be a knife-fingered hand – 5 slashes appear on the victim’s chest and his heart has been pulverized and shredded. A similar crime has occurred 20 years back on St. Libra, with the murder of Bartram North and his household. The sole escapee, one Angela Tramelo, has been incarcerated for the past 20 years for a crime she denies committing.

Angela believes that the killer was an alien “monster”. With Sid investigating leads on earth, the HDA (Human Defence Alliance) office decides to mount an expedition to St. Libra to find this “alien”, with Tramelo’s help. The expedition starts with energy and approval, but the rosy hue fades soon enough. Expedition members are being targeted and killed off one by one by an unseen nemesis, and the hostile terrain of St. Libra is making things very difficult . . .

As I have said above this is a long book and could have been cut down to a compact half. I enjoyed Hamilton’s imaginative prose – especially talk of the “smart dust”, “intelligent meshes” and life-span extension, but I found that the pace was stilted with detailed descriptions of plodding police work. Characters are strong but many and it is hard to keep the large cast straight in your head. Angela is the most interesting character of the lot and her story unfolds in a series of “flashbacks” – a technique I quite liked. However I never quite got immersed enough to root for any protagonist. Maybe it is just me, or maybe large books with many characters, such as this one, are designed to be so; seen from afar and without any emotional involvement.

Given that Tramelo is this book’s main character, it is a little disconcerting to see the degree to which she is sexualized. Also unexpected and off-putting in this sci-fi tome are the sex scenes/orgies. Hamilton has his characters talk in quaint expressions : “aye”, “pet”, “crap on it” – so very not-space-agey. I’m going with a 2.5 rating on this book – for a mystery, Great North Road couldn’t quite develop the steam needed to leave the reader wanting more.