Century Rain is my favorire Alastair Reynolds book. It combines a noirish mystery with a science fiction mystery and uses technology to link them together. In my Terminal World review, I mentioned that this was my favorite Reynolds book and I wanted to revisit it, mainly to get the bad taste of Terminal World out of my brain. This is truly Alastair Reynold’s finest novel.

Wendell Floyd is an American Jazz musician in Paris of the 1930s who’s musical career isn’t going so well. So he does private detective work on the side to pay the bills. When he and his partner are asked to look into a death, matters get very complicated. A woman, Susan White, has died and the police have marked it as an accident. Her landlord is convinced that she was murdered and hires Floyd to investigate.

Meanwhile, in a far future setting, Verity Auger is an archaeologist working on investigating ancient Paris. She’s rescued from a career ending political battle by a secret governmental agency and brought to Mars. They need someone who can go through a portal which has been discovered and retrieve documents from their last agent, who has gone missing. The portal leads to a 1930s Paris and the missing agent is Susan White. Verity has to use her knowledge of ancient Paris to fit in and find the missing documents. This, of course, leads her into the murder investigation that Wendell Floyd is running.

The combination of noir mystery and futuristic setting is one of my favorite combinations and Reynolds does a masterful job of combining the two distinct aspects into one coherent story. Verity Auger, besides being a great name, is a great character creation who can bridge the two worlds and the shout out to Slashdot is well done and doesn’t interfere with enjoying the story. Highly recommended.