5punk

I've read several of Peter Hamilton's books in the past (the Night's Dawn Trilogy and the Commonwealth Saga), and I know that others here have done too, but I've just finished reading his Greg Mandel trilogy. These were the first books Hamilton wrote, and the writing style present in his later books is already very evident. The characters are very well developed, as is the world in which they are set.

The stories are all set in the late 21st Century in a period following significant global warming and a rather tyrannical socialist government in the UK. The setting as a whole is entirely believable, and the increasingly complex storylines have been very well thought out. As with his other books, I found them to be fairly compulsive reading, and I thoroughly enjoyed all three.

I don't really want to go too much into the plots themselves, and at the end of the day if you like sci-fi type stuff, then I think you'll like these books. In terms of Mandel being a psychic detective, he has a gland which secretes neurohormones that enable him to read other people's emotions, rather than their actual thoughts. There are other psychics around too, such as those who can see the future or identify the locations of individuals, but they don't really feature all that much.

It's probably fair to say that the characters aren't developed to the same extent as those in his latter books, but to be fair these 3 are all far shorter than the 1200-odd pages that the other books all stretch to. However, regardless of length (fnar fnar) they're all very enjoyable books, and I'd commend them to anyone who is interested in sci-fi type books.

I've just started reading A Quantum Murder, and even before I was half way through I could tell it was going to be a really good book.

However, I then realised that it was actually book 2 of 3, so I'm in a quandary whether to finish it now or stop and start with the first one. Hmmm.

Well, the trilogy does not comprise a single 3-part story like the Night's Dawn books, so from a narrative point of view it doesn't hugely matter. However, as they're smaller books, reading them in order might help flesh out the characters a bit and there might be subtleties here and there that you otherwise might not pick up on. Also, stuff like Philip Evans might make more sense if you start with the first.

However, if you're halfway through the book then you may as well carry on I guess.