Still, there was no denying that his headquarters world, Xana, set an entirely new record for the shortest interval between my arrival at a place I’d never been and the very first attempt on my life there.
We’re talking about minutes. Minutes.
Things have started to improve for Andrea Cort at last. She’s been given a promotion (arranged by the ancient software intelligences, the AIsource, whom Andrea is secretly working for) and has more freedom than she’s known since being drafted to the Diplomatic Corps. She also has a devoted new lover/bodyguard, the beautiful cylinked pair Oscin and Skye (former lovers who’d undergone a procedure to merge their personalities together to become one person in two bodies, and yes, they do have sex). Unfortunately she’s still the notorious survivor of an unexplained massacre, and she still has a price on her head. After landing at Xana she fights off a very clumsy, very amateur assassination attempt by attackers wielding an impossibly rare weapon, The Claw of God, which kills by dissolving the victim internally, and which was invented by an obscure sect of an alien race 15000 years ago.
Andrea’s still trying to figure that one out when she and her companion(s) board a luxurious space elevator, owned by her host Hans Bettelhine, the patriarch of the Bettelhine Munitions Corporation. Over the next several hours the space elevators failsafes, well, fail. The elevator carriage is stuck high above the planet’s surface, another visitor is murdered with a second Claw of God, and every member of the boarding party is a suspect. As the Dip Corps Prosecutor-at-Large, Andrea now has to wade through a tangled mess of family history and political intrigue while surrounded by members of a corporation that manufactures weapons capable of blowing up entire planets. And even though there have been at least two attempts on her life since accepting an invitation that still hasn’t been explained, there’s a very good chance that none of this has anything to do with her at all.
Adam-Troy Castro continues to dazzle with his skills at world-building. Every single chapter has more tidbits about alien races: Tchi, K’cenhowten, Riirgaans, and something that Andrea describes as something looking like “a terrestrial donkey – after that donkey had been burned with a blowtorch and then explosively decompressed”. The trip in the space elevator “The Royal Carriage” is a chance to see what wealth really looks like, all the different ways to make oneself comfortable with the money available to a locally owned, family run business, keeping in mind that “locally-owned” refers to the entire planet. And with that kind of wealth comes all of the ways people maneuver behind the scenes to make more wealth, or to hold onto the wealth they already have. The Bettelhine Family has a very long reach, they have access to some pretty terrifying technology, and they have no problems with hiring a war criminal responsible for damning the whole population of seventeen planets to a living death: Magrison’s Fugue. Just one more reason for Andrea to hate the Bettelhine Family and everything they stand for.
Andrea herself is still the same smart-ass, bad-tempered, viciously intelligent character she was in Emmisaries for the Dead, and I love her for it. She’s impossible to intimidate, either with power or money or physical threats, and the author gives her the best rants in the entire book. Andrea has no patience for stupidity; her withering comments are a heck of a lot of fun to read. (Checking the author’s acknowledgements, I notice Adam-Troy Castro gave a special mention to Harlan Ellison. If you’ve ever read any of Mr. Ellison’s work, you’ll understand why this surprises me not at all.)
There were additional baggage inspections, random passengers pulled out of line for special interrogation, even one or two body-cavity searches of travelers who’d asked that indignant question, “Do you know who I am?”
(Yes, we know who you are. You’re somebody not nearly as important as you think you are. We will now demonstrate this to you in terms that will calibrate your self-image to its proper level, once and for all. Please bend over. This will hurt.)
I think this is a great story, but what I’m not sure about is if this is a great mystery. I don’t read a lot of mysteries, so it’s hard to judge if this one works, or if it’s a bunch of conclusions the reader wouldn’t have been able to reach with the information we’re given. It’s definitely a very talky book; at least seventy-five percent of the story takes place within the confines of the space elevator carriage, so most of the scenes are of Andrea interrogating the other passengers, and reflecting on everyone’s history. We even have a classic “I’ve called you all together…” scene where Andrea talks through every one of her suspicions and then reveals the final culprit…after which of course all hell breaks loose.
I did get a little irritated at what I call “The Annoying NPC” syndrome, where someone other than the main character (usually the AISource speaking directly to Andrea) obviously knows enough to solve the whole mystery, but withholds all that information for some arbitrary reason they won’t explain. I think there were a few too many scenes that could be summarized with “Here’s just enough information to prove I know more than what I’m saying. But I must say no more…” But the story kept me interested even in the middle of a chapter-long digression, and like the previous book in the series there are several mini-mysteries in addition to the main whodunnit, and each of them were a surprise. We get to know a lot more about Andrea and her history and her whole reason for being invited to Xana in the first place. But I must say no more…
(Okay, one more thing. There’s a third book in this series, “War of the Marionettes”, which brings Andrea to the planet Vlhan, the setting of the first two short-stories of Adam-Troy Castro that I ever read. But it was initially only released in German, and when it was finally released in English it was only in audio-book form. No, there’s no explanation for this, and yes, I’m irritated about it. Books-on-tape are fine for long car trips, but the Andrea Cort novels are something I want to linger over in written form. A google search hasn’t turned up anything, so please leave a comment if you know more about what the heck happened with the publishing of this book, or if I can actually hope for a printed form sometime in the near future, ’cause gee darn.)