Great North Road
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4.4 • 100 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Great North Road is a standalone adventure from science fiction star Peter F. Hamilton, the author of The Night's Dawn trilogy.
In Newcastle, AD 2142, Detective Sidney Hurst attends a brutal murder scene. The victim is one of the wealthy North family’s clones, but the most disturbing aspect is how he died. Twenty years ago, a North clone billionaire and his household were slaughtered in the exact same manner, on the tropical planet of St Libra. So was Angela Tramelo wrongly convicted back then? She’d never wavered under interrogation – claiming she alone survived an alien attack.
With St Libran bio-fuel now powering Earth's economy, investigating this alien threat becomes top priority. A vast expedition is mounted via the planet’s Newcastle gateway – including Angela Tramelo, grudgingly released from prison. But the expedition is cut off, deep within St Libra's rainforests. Then the bloodshed begins.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hamilton's stand-alone near-future mystery is a mesmerizing page-turner whose pace never lags despite the book's substantial length. In 2143, Newcastle police detective Sidney Hurst realizes that a naked corpse dragged from the river was a member of the North family. Clones Augustine, Bartram, and Constantine North founded a company that invested in trans-spatial connection, a technology that opened gateways to other star systems and expanded humanity's access to energy and living space. They cloned themselves in turn, by the hundreds. The wounds on the dead North, whose exact identity is vexingly hard to pin down, match those on Bartram's body after he and his household were slaughtered in 2121 and Angela Tramelo, convicted of those murders, always claimed that an alien monster was the real culprit. The intense whodunit plot and the sustained ambiguity about Tramelo's innocence or guilt are enhanced by plausible extrapolations of 22nd-century human cultures.
Customer Reviews
Sprawling life
Angela has a sprawling life that gradually sweeps out through the story. As we learn more about her the more complex the picture becomes
A stellar murder mystery!
Simply stunning! Possibly the best sci-fi I've read in the last five years, I found it impossible to put down.
Are we there yet?
I am a fan of Hamilton's books on the whole, but this is not one of his best. Great detail and imagination as to be expected but some of the characters seem so familiar as to have been recycled out of better stories. The Great North Road is like driving up the A1 to Newcastle from the south, long, monotonous and frustrating. I have to wonder if such a journey is where the seed of this story was spawned. Like the frustrated and exhausted characters of the story, I fully empathised with them and got the same experience through slogging through this doorstop tome. If that was the intent, maybe it was a wee bit overdone. I did finish it and am relieved to have managed, even if I did skim the last three hundred pages or so. Not for me but I'm not put off either.. Next book looks good, back to form there, I'm sure.