Oh I do enjoy taking a trip around Paul McAuley's future solar system, chasing secrets and technological maguffins and odd sub-cultures in odder places, pursued by assassins and cultists and the past in a quest for the future. Our hero is Hari, marooned after his ship is boarded and his family is killed or captured. He escapes with the head of a scientist locked full of knowledge, and lots of people are after it while Hari himself wants to find what, if anything is left of his family and gain some measure of revenge.

McAuley's writing is crisp and cool and his portrait of the solar system, inhabited but moribund after the fall of an Empire and the rise of millennial cults, with is asteroid garden full of vacuum flowers and moons and habitats and a thawing Earth is fascinating, while Hari's questturns out to be less about revenge and more about getting free of the past.