Halcyon Years

As soon as I began reading this I thought “Century Rain” meets “Poseidon’s Wake” and nothing subsequently changed my mind. Indeed there isn’t much here that isn’t already present in those previous books (Alastair clearly has a soft spot for hard boiled detective noir), but that is not a bad thing. Those familiar elements are reworked into something that works really well.

This is a great fun story – the character of Yuri Gagarin is tremendous fun, with a nice line in malaprop aphorisms. Lemmy the seemingly crooked cop is redeemed from one dimensionality by his love of cooking and Vecchio turns out to be a tough cookie all by herself.

There’s quite a lot of “moving parts” to the story with layers of secrets and conspiracies but it does all make sense in the end and all the mechanisms and subterfuges are plausible.

Alastair at his best, combining hard science with deeply realised characters and a fun, action packed story. Great!