#72 This Virtual Night by C.S. Friedman

 I had read the previous book about twenty years and seriously don’t remember a thing about it and that is fine because this book stands on its own.  Ru Gaya is an outrider, someone who contacts lost colonies and convinces them that coming back into the greater galactic society thanks to technology that allows for long travel. At the beginning of the book she was asleep for twenty years instead of three and her partner died during the mission. She is more than ready to take a mission for the guild to find the programmer that is responsible for an explosion on a space station.   It seems there is a virus infecting people through their VR headsets that changes their everyday perceptions.   Ru needs to get the programmer off a seemingly abandoned space station he crashed on while on the run and return him the to guild.

 

The plot is good and there are some threads that are left that another book in this setting could be written but the reader isn’t left hanging for another book.  It did leave me with the feeling that I need to reread This Alien Shore since I can’t remember the plot to it at all since I liked the setting this story was set in.

 

Review copy provided by the publisher through Edelweiss.