Great North Road
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4.3 • 11 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
ST LIBRA IS A PARADISE FOR EARTH'S MEGA-RICH, UNTIL THE KILLING BEGINS.
When attending a Newcastle murder scene, Detective Sidney Hurst finds a dead North family clone. Yet none have been reported missing. And in 2122, twenty years ago, a North clone billionaire was horrifically murdered in the same manner on the tropical planet of St Libra. So, if the murderer is still at large, was Angela Tramelo wrongly convicted? She never wavered under interrogation, claiming she alone survived an alien attack.
Investigating this potential alien threat now becomes the Human Defence Agency's top priority. St Libran bio-fuel is the lifeblood of Earth's economy and must be secured. A vast expedition is mounted via the Newcastle gateway, and experts are dispatched to the planet - with Angela Tramelo, grudgingly released from prison.
But the expedition is cut off deep within St Libra's rainforests, and the murders begin. Angela insists it's the alien, but her new colleagues aren't sure. Did she see an alien, or does she have other reasons for being on St Libra?
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.
