I've started following Chris Brookmyre again after becoming utterly engrossed in his Jack Parlabane trilogy (Dead girl walking; Black widow and Want you gone). When I heard that he was writing a crime novel set on board a space station, I wondered whether it would work - I dabble in sci fi occasionally (Altered Carbon is my top sci fi novel) and wondered whether it would be possible to do a "straight" crime novel in a futuristic setting. Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe novella One Small Step is slightly tongue in cheek story of Dalziel and Pascoe investigating the first murder on the moon - it's fun, but not the real thing.

So, what do I think - I have to say Brookmyre's done it again - it's excellent. It's a real crime novel and a genuine sci fi stuff. He's created effortlessly a futuristic setting on a space staion, with lots of credible characters and some real crime. The plotting is, as always with Brookmyre, tight and pacey, keeping you going needing to know not just what happens next, but what on earth is really going on (no pun intended there).

I've no hesitation recommending this book, If you like crime, it's great; if you like sci fi it's great - if you like both it's double great.

I wonder what he's working on next....?

This is the latest book by Chris Brookmyre, so I knew I was going to enjoy it because he is one of my favourite authors. This is different to his usual books, a mix of crime and sci-fi, but it has all the depth of character and good plotting that makes a Brookmyre book so enjoyable. I have to admit, I did miss the Scottish characters that I love so much, but in a book set on a space station many years in the future I don't suppose there is much scope for nationalistic tendencies. The story begins with a particularly gory murder (typical Brookmyre) and then follows two women, Nikki and Alice, as they become involved in the aftermath where nothing is what it seems and things very quickly spiral out of control (again, typical Brookmyre!). Most enjoyable.

This novel is an excellent combination of the crime and science fiction genres. Our main characters are Nikki Freeman, otherwise known as Nikki Fixx, and Dr Alice Blake. Alice is travelling to Cuidad de Cielo (‘the City in the Sky’), otherwise known as CdC, on behalf of the Federation of National Governments to replace the outgoing Principal of the Security Oversight Executive. She is there to weed out corruption and crime and that certainly exists on CdC.

The City in the Sky is a space station, created to test out spaceships and hopefully create a super-spaceship, which will go in search of new planets to call home. Nikki Fixx is an ex homicide detective, who works for the Seguridad (an internal police force). However, like so many of the inhabitants of CdC, she also moonlights – offering protection, sorting out problems and helping the movement of contraband, mostly alcohol, around the station. Brookmyre has created a realistic vision of the future. Workers who are mainly on short term contracts, doing dead end jobs. A society without children, where, if a woman finds herself pregnant, she is giving the offer of a termination or a swift return to Earth – which she pays for. A place where the rich live in the newest part of the space station, while the poorer inhabit tiny apartments in the older part of the city - where the wealthy come to slum and to party.

Meanwhile, in the future, there is a realisation that you cannot create androids like people; leading research to improve brain functions. Many of the inhabitants of CdC have an implant, which enables them to access information immediately and this can be upgraded. Professor Maria Goncalves is a famous scientist, whose life, and work, exists almost exclusively on CdC – where she is famous for her research. She is greatly revered on CdC and rarely seen. Indeed, many things on CdC seem to be hidden away and lurking in the shadows.

Crime is mainly hushed up on CdC, but when a dismembered body is found floating in a chamber, Nikki is chosen to investigate the crime – and Alice Blake is shadowing her. For someone who is puritanical about corruption, Alice is shocked at the turf wars, gangs, corruption, violence and crime she witnesses. Meanwhile, as Nikki realises who Alice is, she wonders whether she is being set up to fail. Even if she manages to solve the murder, there is a little issue of a missing shipment of contraband, which she was meant to be protecting – and things are going to get a lot more complicated…

This is a gritty, well realised crime novel, with an interesting cyberpunk feel to it. Yes, mankind is reaching out to other planets, but they are simply taking their problems with them. Inequality, crime and corruption are rife, while the inhabitants of CdC are living an unreal, single life – no families, no children, no real future. Many are running away from events on Earth, but find they bring their problems with them, or end up spending all they earn trying to forget about them. I hope that Christopher Brookmyre writes more crime novels, set in the future, as this worked really well. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

Evolving from the irreverent tone of his earlier violent crime fiction, I guess we've all had to accept that Christopher Brookmyre is now the more mature Chris Brookmyre, but it can't be denied that the author was running out of steam in a limited genre that he had metaphorically as well as literarily beaten to death. Since then he's been more ambitious in his range and subject matter and his latest science-fiction work Places in the Darkness is one of his most promising ventures yet.

Alice Blake of the Federation of National Governments has been assigned a six-month posting to Ciudad de Cielo to replace the former head of Security oversight on the station. CdC is a space station in orbit seventy thousand kilometres above Ocean Terminal on earth. As they are currently working on a project to build a spaceship, the Arca Estrella to set out for other habitable planets, the station is supposed to be an ideal, a place that "should be clean and pure because it's the birthplace of mankind's future". The FNG however are not unaware that in reality corruption and criminality are widespread on CdC (SeeDee for short and also by nature), so Alice has been sent to observe and report on the scale of the problem and monitor the efforts that Seguridad are taking to prevent it, or determine even whether they are actually facilitating the criminality.

That would certainly seem to be the case from the activities of Seguidad agent sergeant Nikki Freeman, well known to the seedier side of the station personnel as "Nikki Fixx", who seems to have a hand in every kind of illegal activity on the station, from backhanders, protection rackets and prostitution to customs evasion and bootlegging. Alice, posing as a rookie FNG observer Jessica Cho, has been assigned as an observer working alongside Nikki, is beginning to get an idea of how things really operate on Seedee. There's a more serious matter to be investigated however; a body found in pieces floating in a zero gravity tank, it's the first official murder on CdC, and things are about to get even worse.

Essentially Places in the Darkness functions according to the familiar path of the buddy cop movie. A streetwise fast-and-loose detective with the local law enforcement (Nikki) has been teamed up with a straight-laced inexperienced "Fed" (Alice), giving the official a lesson in having to deal with the harsh realities of life that they don't tell you about in the instruction manuals at the academy. It's not however just a matter of placing a well-worn genre convention in a science-fiction setting just to freshen it up a bit. Brookmyre uses the self-contained world of CdC to look at relevant questions that we have not about the increasing use of technology to monitor citizens activities and curtail freedoms, and the increasing control that big business - the Quadriga consortium here - exert over individuals and governments.

Places in the Darkness manages to hold the future up as a mirror to contemporary society by reflecting on similar flawed puritanical and authoritarian attempts to create an ideal society in the past in the exploring of new frontiers and in the Prohibition laws. But Chris Brookmyre also wants to look beyond the now to explore the rationale behind technology as a tool to create a perfect society and question whether that really is a tenable concept. Instead of creating an advanced society, technology might even be a trap that we build around ourselves, and instead of advancing human civilisation we actually need to consider whether it might be dragging us backwards into the past.

Again, the idea of a space-station as a cross-section of society, and its attempts to create a perfect society in a flawed environment dependent on technology and heedless of the reality of human nature is not a particularly new concept in science-fiction. Chris Brookmyre however does succeed in bringing back a little of his old style dynamics and social commentary here, with those familiar barbs of coarse language, extreme violence and black humour. Nothing is as straightforward as it seems however and the truth is always shifting - another consequence of advanced technology - and Brookmyre has plenty of paranoid conspiracy twists to throw into Places in the Darkness. It's his most convincing work in this genre so far.

I am a big fan of Brookmyre and his Parlabane series and I am just starting to cut my teeth with Sci-Fi as a genre so what better book to read than this one. Admittedly, it did take me a while to really get into it as there was quite a bit of scene setting and technology explanation to get my head around early doors but get through it I did albeit slowly. It probably helped that I have only just read Artemis and there are quite a few parallels between the two books but where I thought Artemis was easy to read in a more YA sort of way, this one was pure hard core sci-fi through and through.
Our two main characters in this book couldn't have been more different. We have Dr Alice Blake who is a Fed to all intents and purposes, arriving at space station CdC at the start of the book and not really knowing what to make of it all initially. Then there's Nikki Freeman, a local cop with fingers in many dodgy pies on the side. Couldn't be more chalk and cheese if you tried but a very interesting combination when thrown together to investigate a rather grizzly murder, reputedly the first on the station. Well, the first they have been forced to admit to anyway. And so begins a rather interesting journey as together and separately they scour the station's seedy underbelly, determined to get to the bottom of this most heinous crime. Then disaster for Nikki as she herself is implicated in the crimes, forcing her to go underground. Using every trick in her book to travel around unseen, can Nikkie get to the bottom of things before she is caught? And if she's not guilty, who is, and why?
There is so much more to this book than just the solving of the crimes therein but spoilers prevent me from even hinting at them here. Suffice to say that this book goes quite deep with regard to moral and social issues and does it really rather well; thought provoking indeed. It definitely left me with quite a bit to think about. Not being an aficionado of the genre, I am not sure how well the ideas in this book fit with the genre overall but, to the newbie me, I was more then satisfied with the build-up, debate and overall outcome.
I absolutely loved our two main characters too. Especially their development throughout the book. The way they were written to behave during the majority of the book kept me guessing pretty much throughout the book as to their motivations and indeed place in the overall shenanigans. It's a good job this is one of my favourite authors as I trust him as a writer and feel that I would maybe have retired confused had I not been able to do this. But trust him I did and he came through for me completely!
The setting is also really well defined; once i got my head round things. I especially loved the more seedier elements and also the underground, forgotten people. Very Brookmyre, very noir, and something he does very well, especially in his early Parlabane books. He has a knack of really getting to the nitty gritty of this side of things and this was evident also in this book.
All in all, with hindsight, a bit of an ambitious sci-fi for me to tackle but on reflection an important one for my education and one that I thoroughly enjoyed. My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

The accomplished Chris Brookmyre gives us a taut suspense filled crime thriller through the medium of sci-fi. In a departure from his usual fare, he locates to a space station of the future, The City in the Sky (Ciudad de Cielo, CdC), where there has never been a murder, no children, and is the site of important developing technologies for those on earth. Dr Alice Blake, representing the Federal National Governments on Earth, arrives on CdC set to replace the current Principal of the Securities Oversight Executive. She is greeted warily amidst tension and fear about the clean up operations she is looking to implement and the repercussions this will have amidst the corruption amongst the elite and the lawmakers who profit hugely, and those who gain in law enforcement and the general population. Brookmyre gives us impressively detailed world building in a fast paced story of visceral gut wrenching murders, identity, consciousness, memory, and philosophical musings on what it is to be human. Dr Blake may not know it but she has returned home to engage with and be challenged by her notions of crime and punishment.

It is common practice for most people to have a mesh implanted into the back of their heads to upload the latest information, skills, knowledge and data on a continuous basis. The first acknowledged murder on CdC has ex-LAPD Sergeant Nikki Freeman, of the Seguridad (local police), leading the investigation, observed by Alice operating under the radar. Nikki is everything Alice despises, she is corrupt, takes bribes, runs her own protection racket, needs her drink, and avails herself of prostitutes. Nikki would say that she uses her street smarts to keep the peace amidst the reality of what people are like. Alice is incorruptible, straitlaced, intelligent and by the book. For Alice, Nikki is the key to gain insight and access into the seedy districts, with their underground sex and fight clubs, the black economy, the greed, exploitation, the inequality, the underground shanty town of ghosts and the criminal gangs, all of which would be kept from her otherwise. As Nikki tries to manipulate Alice, numerous other murders take place and it soon becomes clear that Nikki is being set up. Neither woman likes each other, but the saint and the sinner are going to have to find a way to work with each other to get to the truth, and The Sentinel project that gets anyone who comes across it killed.

Brookmyre gives us two strong woman who begin to see each other as a vital complement to each other in their abilities to investigate the macabre murders and the the future development of law enforcement on CdC. His character development of Alice and Nikki is done with skill and expertise, giving us a ringside seat as their uncompromising perspectives begin to broaden to see the multiple shades of grey that exist in a complex world and a complicated humanity. The novel asks whether the ability to wipe out bad memories is something we should consider. Would wiping out all human transgressions, crime and vice leave us with a remotely recognisable human society? A thought provoking, gripping and tense sci-fi thriller from a wonderful storyteller which I recommend highly. Many thanks to Little, Brown for an ARC.