|
|
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Story of the Tainted, April 6 2004
Consequences in the third novel in the Retrieval Artist series, following Extremes. In the previous volume, Miles Flint discovered that a murder during the Armstrong Marathon was committed by a psychopathic Disappeared. When she fled the Moon, he chased her in Paloma's yacht and caught up while she was delayed in destroying a space cop ship. In the ensuing encounter, they shot each other, but Flint survived. Meanwhile, Noelle DeRicci had also learned the real identity of the murderer and discovered the plot to release a deadly virus into the Armstrong Dome. She managed to quarantine the Marathon before the virus could spread to the Dome itself and thus saved thousands of lives.In this novel, DeRicci has been promoted to Assistant Chief of Detectives and is assigned to a murder case with political implications. She discovers that Flint has a connection with the case and goes alone to talk with him. Flint refuses to discuss his professional relationships with the victims, but offers to work on the case as a detective for his usual fees. DeRicci declines this offer, due more to budget problems than otherwise. After DeRicci departs, Flint remembers his efforts to retrieve Carolyn Lahiri for her parents after she has been pardoned. Unlike most Disappeared, she had been fleeing a human government. She and four other college students had joined the rebels in the civil wars on Etae, an alien world that had been invaded by other aliens for its resources and later settled by humans. Ten years before, the rebels had conquered the planet and established an unaligned human government. Now they are negotiating for inclusion into the Earth Alliance and the talks are being held in Armstrong. While investigating Carolyn's parents, Flint had inserted taps into their security system. Using his backdoor, he viewed the crime scene and then checked the log files. Although most of the relevant logs had been scrambled, one redundant backup file shows the actual murder. The act had been committed by a hired assassin using killing enhancements not detectable by standard weapon scans. In this story, Flint searches for the assassin, but DeRicci soon finds herself dealing with the political situation. Anatolya Dobryn, the Butcher of Etae, is the Etae representative to the negotiating session. The Earth Alliance diplomats are biased against admission of Etae into the alliance, so Armstrong has been chosen for the conference just to inconvenience the Etae delegation. However, this inconvenience turns into riots and deadly violence against the Etae party. Then a former Etaen settler escalates the violence to disaster level. This story shows Dobryn as a talented propagandist who has only done what she considered to be necessary to achieve justice. It is surely no accident that her name invokes Balkan associations, for the Etae situation strongly resembles that of Bosnia. As the author points out, most governments were founded in violence -- as was the United States -- but the rebels later changed their image to that of peacemakers. How, then, should successful revolutionaries be judged, as butchers or heroes? Highly recommended for Rusch fans and for anyone else who enjoys police procedurals with good characterization and unexpected plot twists. -Arthur W. Jordin
|
