Great North Road

Got about halfway through and gave up. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't great and wasn't holding my interest

One of Peter's weaker books unfortunately, it wasn't bad but you could literally cut most of the first third out without affecting anything.

Three stars for my first ever Hamilton. “Crap on that!” (Read the book and you'll understand).

Squirrel-killer once again available towards original purpose.

Aim at squirrel.
Scare squirrel.
Squirrel runs away.

It is a book, it was never going to realistically cause any damage to the poor rodent now, would it?

Loved how the Angela's backstory (one of the main characters) was revealed throughout the book. The potential alien lurking throughout the book was pretty gripping too. The book was longer than it needed to be though.

I didn't find Angela's romances to be that convincing either. She's put on such a pedestal (in terms of appearance) and then gets with some ordinary dudes. She uses Paresh, but then ends up caring for him, but I feel like a hardened badass like Angela would end up ditching him?Also Ian's creepy stalking near the end of the book was sort of acknowledged, but then all swept under the rug as soon as he got with the girl. His coworkers didn't even care that he was abusing police powers to watch her on cameras. Felt useless as a side plot if there wasn't going to be any consequences for it.

[b:Great North Road 13573419 Great North Road Peter F. Hamilton https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1344371600s/13573419.jpg 19154394] is long. It is complex. It crosses genre's.Most of all, the book is an SF story as it is set in the future, the action occurs on multiple planets, and involves alien contact. There is a murder to be resolved, so it is a police procedural. It also has lots of high-tech hijinks and action, giving it a techno-thriller feel. There are conspiracies and secret agendas, giving it a mystery/spy feel. Peter F. Hamilton twines it all together and makes it work.Good book.

Peter F. Hamilton has a large collection of works published, including the very popular series Night's Dawn, and the Void trilogy.

In Great North Road, a member of the prominent North family is found murdered, in the same exact manner used as a previous North massacre twenty years prior. Angela Tramelo was convicted and has been in prison ever since–so who could have done it? Angela claimed twenty years ago that an alien monster was responsible, but no one believed her. Could there be a sentient species out there, hell-bent on wiping out the North family? The planet St. Libra, where the original murders took place, is key to the economy of Earth, and any threat is one that must be investigated. The Human Defense Agency launches a massive expedition to St. Libra, with the intention of finding and capturing the monster–that is if Angela Tramelo is telling the truth, and a monster actually exists.

Great North Road CoverMeanwhile, Detective Sid Hurst is investigating the North murder on Earth, and all the clues point not to a monster, but to a corporate struggle that turned deadly. As his investigation continues, Angela's story seems less and less likely.

Angela is released from prison to join the St. Libra expedition, since she's the only one to have survived an attack by the monster, but her every action is scrutinized and questioned. As the expedition searches for the monster, strange accidents begin causing injuries and deaths to their group, until even the planet itself seems to turn against them.

The novel is–first and foremost–a mystery set in a science fictional universe. The world-building is phenomenal, and it's easy to believe that events on the pages are real, with a rich history behind them. Though long, the author does a nice job of filling in backgrounds, but without providing too much exposition; when used, it's effective. Each character comes from a background that's fully-fleshed. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the characters' current incarnations; they never quite ascend to people we would want to be friends with. There's some indefinable gap that truly prevents the characters from jumping out of the page, and feeling like they belong. Some may disagree with this assessment, but the characters never wowed me, the way some books have. Still, that's not to say that Great North Road isn't a good book, because it is. It's just not a great book.

The book is long, and not just in sheer page count. At 976 pages, it's a lengthy story, but it could easily have been told in a more condensed manner. Often times the reader is thrown back in time, to be given another tidbit of the story about one particular character, then returned to the present, where the revelations reveal just a little bit more about their motivations or actions. It gets a little tiring, especially as the book starts to reach its climax, only to be thrown back in time with a new revelation. None of the things that are revealed are cheap, or unnecessary, but the back-and-forth over a book of this length is wearying.

Even though it's long, Hamilton does a good job of keeping readers interested. The pacing of the story is good, if methodical, and the end result, and resolution to the mystery is at least well-executed, if just a tad too far-fetched to have been worth the mystery to begin with.

For fans of a good mystery, Great North Road can be recommended, but for most casual readers, it's probably not for you.

It only took a little more than 9 months to read. And I teared up in the end. Good book.

Great book. Long but a wonderful to read. I really enjoyed the story, but still I felt like there was something tiny missing. The cherry that would have made that a solid 5 star book. Still I highly recommend it.

Fantastic story, brilliantly told.

Despite being a Peter F. Hamilton fan, I have a confession to make – I never could get into the Reality Dysfunction. I loved the tech, I thought the characters were great, I just couldn't wrap my brain around the dead coming back through a dimensional rift. It just smacked of cheesy, especially when Al Capone made his appearance.

I started the Great Road North was some trepidation – Hamilton can be hit or miss in my experience – and was pleased to find a good story, if a touch repetitive of previous works. Hamilton has returned to the kind of story that made Paula Myo so awesome. Blending crime and aliens is a successful formula for Hamilton, so it's only natural that he would return to those roots in this story. The setting for this tale is familiar – set a century or so into the future, the advent of a portal technology has allowed man to spread across the galaxy. At the pinnacle of the economic paradise are the North's, a family of successive generations of clones. When a North washes up dead, it's big news. When it's the second clone to be murdered in a uniquely grisly way in twenty years, and the last suspect was an alien with knives for fingers, things begin to get interesting.

Hamilton deftly weaves together the stories of Sid, a Newcastle detective on the trail of a murderer, and Angela, the sole surviving witness of the first encounter, 9 light years from Earth on the trail of the alien monster that no one else believes exists. Hamilton litters the page with a small supporting cast that are rarely thin or cardboard, and always seem to offer us a little more insight into our main characters.

The only fault I have with the novel is that we've been here before. This isn't the Commonwealth, and these aren't the same characters, but the themes are reminiscent of Hamilton's other books. A great read, and definitely fills an itch for a space opera with killer monsters, but not his best.