Machine Vendetta: 3 (The Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies)

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The Panoply is a small but mighty police and peacekeeping organization of which Tom Dreyfus is a high ranking officer. The relentless narrative momentum it employs simply underscores the pertinent urgency of that topic.

The big concepts and complex story effectively pull readers into intriguing speculation about human identity and potential. When another high-ranking member of the council of protects is killed by being misdirected to a hostile asteroid, Creature is tasked with finding out why and exposing the killers. The prefects are, after all, people devoted to their duties, even at the expense of much private life.These characters seem real and lived in, with lives outside their jobs, different ways of approaching problems, and each other. I thank Alastair Reynolds and Orbit Books for kindly providing a temporary electronic review copy of this work. The plot and the action are so dense and convoluted that I'm not sure whether some of the plot lines were resolved.

This led to me wondering why she was always referred to by her first name while Dreyfus is almost always referred to by his last. As Tench’s mentor and friend, Tom Dreyfus is brought in to investigate her death and the events leading up to it – What was the reason for the trip? Dreyfus, Jane Aumonier, the senior officer of the Panoply, Thalia Ng and other prefects have to unravel multiple mysteries to understand the depth of betrayal and AI infiltration they are facing. Reynolds combines depth in characterization and dazzling hard-science applications to keep the reader turning pages. The action, technology, character development, and scope of "Machine Vendetta" really worked for me.

I can't recommend this more highly, and though the story line here is essentially a new one there is enough essential background from the previous novels to make it worthwhile for new readers to start at the beginning of the series. The Prefects are the cops of the Glitter Band, the ring of artificial environments orbiting a planet in the Epsilon Eridani solar system. You don't need to have read the previous books - enough of the backstories are given along the way to explain to newcomers - but those who have read the previous novels will appreciate what happens more.

Banks, I really appreciated the aspect of sophisticated agents using high technology, intelligence, and courage to "do the right thing". As Tench’s mentor and friend, Tom Dreyfus is brought in to investigate her death and the events leading up to it - What was the reason for the trip? As with the the other Alastair Reynolds space opera novels I have read, this was quite entertaining and was just what I needed. I don't know if this is a counterpoint to some of the police abuse stories we've seen recently, but it's hard not to see it as such. Meanwhile something treacherous is happening again, and it will take all their knowledge and power to find the culprit and save the day.In the end, all the desperate elements come together but nicely in a plot worthy of a murder mystery. I would say that it is similar to and Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel, with a cast of police agents investigating a serious of what look like random crimes, and finding that they are all the same. From the king of modern space opera comes a new adventure in the Prefect Dreyfus series— Machine Vendetta is a thrilling tale of deadly conspiracies and old enemies that refuse to die. Yet Reynolds makes every action Dreyfus and the others take flow from the people they are so that we get a rich sense of what they’re like.