The setting is Harlan's World, 95% ocean, where ancient alien orbital systems still vaporize anything that flies too high. Kovacs, older and madder, is running a private vendetta against Taliban-like fundamentalists whose principles--in a world where death is reversible--forced an old girl-friend and her child to die permanently. Wounded and on the run as usual, he escapes by joining a "deCom" squad hunting down human-built weapons systems that don't want to be decommissioned. Soon he's entangled with a woman who (some of the time) seems to be a reincarnation of long-dead revolutionary leader Quellcrist Falconer…

Meanwhile, the dictatorial ruling family of Harlan's World has set the deadliest possible assassin on Kovacs' trail--an illegal copy of his younger self, in a brand-new body.

High-energy complications follow. There's unexpected violence in a virtual-reality monastery. Kovacs and "Quellist" sympathizers plan a crazy James Bond assault on an impregnable island fortress, an attack that ends in a surprise twist. The idealistic Quellcrist (if that's who she is) has the key to a genetic time-bomb never before used: "A whole new form of death." Even those implacable orbital weapons that smite high-fliers with "angelfire" have secrets of their own.

Morgan's knack for grisly set-pieces and heart-stopping violence makes for compulsive reading--emphatically not for the squeamish. Against all odds, his fast-moving choreography of pursuits, escapes, shoot-outs, reversals and betrayals finally ends in a satisfying touch of compassion, a trace of hope. A superior SF thriller. --David Langford