Richard K. Morgan's Thin Air is not quite being marketed right - I have seen no mention that this novel is set in the same world as his earlier Thirteen/Black Man (US/UK titles). This might be an attempt to distance the new work from what's often considered not to be one of Morgan's better works.
Personally, I loved Thirteen. But Thin Air is night and day better. It's a thick book and the action takes place entirely on a noir vision of Mars, and a surprisingly reasonable one. Mars has been colonized with the help of atmosphere-holding forcefields and biological improvements that allow the colonists to survive on a lot less oxygen.
The title is, like the original UK title of Thirteen, something of a pun...except even more so. Thin Air refers not just to the Martian atmosphere but to the mysterious disappearance at the center of the story.
Our protagonist, Veil is, like the protagonist of Thirteen, a genetically engineered human "variant." Unlike the earlier book, he was not created to be an aggressive super soldier, but rather to be an overrider - a human pilot who is pulled out of cryosleep when a long distance spaceship gets into trouble. But he's still basically a super soldier. And one who got mustered out after a screw up and left stranded on Mars. His goal: To get back to Earth.
But he gets pulled into a wonderful web of crime, conspiracy, and arguments over the future of the "high frontier."
Thin Air is part noir, part cyberpunk and even a good chunk western. Morgan is the master of noir cyberpunk, and it shows in this book, which demonstrates a mature writer on the top of his game. The book is morally ambiguous, deals with themes of nature, nurture, and breaking free of both in a way that almost equals (in a very different way) the work of C.J. Cherryh. We get a deep view into the mindset of somebody who is at once very human and not quite so.
This is Morgan's best work yet, and I highly recommend it to people who like noir, grittier futures, and a reasonably decent mystery (I wouldn't call this a mystery book, but...)
Content warning: This book contains explicit violence and somewhat explicit M/F sex.
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