Back

I rather enjoyed this book. A rollicking good yarn against a nicely sketched future-scape dominated by gigantic megacorporations.

Asahel Frost, to spite his manipulating father, decided not to go into the family business – an Interstellar Trading Concern – but to, instead, become a cop, investigating the great Megacorporations and to expose their shadier dealings. As a consequence, he is set up, convicted on trumped up charges and ‘thrown away’ – becoming a non-person with no rights under the law.

Now, the family firm is in trouble and old enemies have decided to either use Asahel against his family, or ensure that he does not remain a loose end by killing him. This encourages Asahel to rejoin the family and bury the hatchet with his father, preferably in the collective heads of their enemies. Mixed up in all this is a conspiracy by the alien Haluk to acquire habitable planets in the Perseus Spur, and to acquire a genetic cure for an evolutionary adaptation that no longer serves their purposes.

This book is a real page-turner, even if one reviewer did rather unkindly compare it to a deep space collision between E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith and Dallas!

There’s a brief article on Julian May on Wikipedia and a not-so-caustic review here.