When Peter Hamilton is good, he is very, very good, and this is one of his best. It's partly a monster movie and partly a spiffing police procedural, with down-at-heels cops in a future Newcastle investigating a very strange murder of the offspring of a very powerful family. The method of killing has been used before, and a woman was sent to jail for it but she claimed it had been done by an alien monster. It turns out she may have been right, because she certainly didn't commit the second murder. There are mysteries upon mysteries, on Earth and on alien planets, the suspicions shift from person to person and from motive to motive and you wish you'd kept up on the weight training, because you won't want to put the book down.