Great North Road

Hamilton’s stand-alone near-future mystery is a mesmerizing page-turner whose pace never lags despite the book’s substantial length. In 2143, Newcastle police detective Sidney Hurst realizes that a naked corpse dragged from the river was a member of the North family. Clones Augustine, Bartram, and Constantine North founded a company that invested in trans-spatial connection, a technology that opened gateways to other star systems and expanded humanity’s access to energy and living space. They cloned themselves in turn, by the hundreds. The wounds on the dead North, whose exact identity is vexingly hard to pin down, match those on Bartram’s body after he and his household were slaughtered in 2121—and Angela Tramelo, convicted of those murders, always claimed that an alien monster was the real culprit. The intense whodunit plot and the sustained ambiguity about Tramelo’s innocence or guilt are enhanced by plausible extrapolations of 22nd-century human cultures. Agents: James MacDonald Lockhart, Antony Harwood Ltd. (U.K.); Anthony Gardner, Gardner Literary (U.S.). (Jan.)