Red Planet Blues

"Oh! My favourite author!

*pause*

I'm an atheist because of him."

Okay, seriously, can you pay an author a stronger compliment than "I changed my religion because of you."? I think not. I had read Robert J. Sawyer's Calculating God a number of years ago, and I have to wonder if that was the book that caused my friend to think critically about the world around him (and the nuttiness that religions inspire), but I hadn't been recalling that book when I picked up this one.

In reality, I picked this one up because it seemed to be a gumshoe detective novel with a science-fiction twist, which I happen *cough* Dresden *couch* to have a fondness for.

I enjoyed this book about Alex Lomax, a private eye working on Mars, searching for a missing person and eventually investigating a murder. The book has a number of small mysteries in the larger arc of the book, which I found a little off when I started reading the book (and came to the end of the first solved mystery), but they all tied together really well, and I enjoyed the book.