The Mandel Files

The Mandel Files were really three books collected into two books, all written by prolific science fiction author Peter F. Hamilton.  I received the first book as a gift from a friend who thought I might enjoy it.  However, I had heard a lot of bad things about Mr. Hamilton from some of my other friends so the book lived on my shelf for a few months while I viewed it with some trepidation.  Eventually, of course, I got around to reading it and I was pleasantly surprised. 

These books are the first that Mr. Hamilton got published and, as such, do not go with his normal setting of far future space opera.  Instead they are set in a near future Britain where the world is recovering from significant changes that global warming inflicted upon it.  This book manages to do this without being as preachy as some other books that are in a post global warming apocalypse, which is nice.  The books follow a detective named Greg Mandel (hence the name of the series) who has an interesting ability.  The back of the book calls him a human lie detector, and that is the boiled down version, but basically he is somewhat telepathic.  However, the story does a reasonably good job of explaining how this came to pass and walks the fine line between introducing too many characters with abilities similar to Greg's, thereby turning the story into a clash of superheroes, and too few, making Greg seem a superman among mortals. 

The first book (of the three), is called Mindstar Rising, it does a great job of setting up the world and the protagonists of the stories, and is a good blend of mystery and science fiction.  The second book, A Quantum Murder, is much more of a mystery than the previous story.  There is not very much action until the end, but that is part of the bargain in a mystery.  The third, The Nano Flower, has perhaps the weakest plot but it has some fantastic action scenes (guys on jetpacks attacking a zeppelin, for example).





These books were written in the early to mid 90's and were supposed to take place in the 2030's.  Obviously, they didn't guess right on all of the technological fronts (though he does start out volume 1 with a forward that is basically an apology for not being able to accurately predict technological progress, which somewhat annoyed me) but what is cool is that he used some companies from his day as the creators of the technology in his story.  This, most of the time, adds a layer of realism.  Of course Lockheed would still be making military tech and so the fact that he slaps the Lockheed name on there instead of a made up company makes it seem a little more real and possible.  However, since these were written 20 years ago, there are some companies that are now laughable.  At one point, they break into a computer hackers den and one of his nicest computers is made by Commodore.  This seems unlikely in any future and broke my suspension of disbelief a little.

Some of the character development in the series is a little lacking.  Occasionally, characters make decisions for basically no reason that is clear to the reader.  But overall the books still have a net positive quality level.  I would say Mindstar Rising is the overall best but The Nano Flower is the most fun to read.  I give the series as a whole an 88%.