Hannu Rajaniemi is a new name in science fiction, but hopefully he will stick around for awhile. Like a few other debut books this last year, there are a number of interesting ideas, but the story fails to stick together as a whole. I don’t think I’m asking for a lot, just a halfway decent plot and some characters that I actually care about. But too often, such as in Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief, there are a lot of cool ideas, but few characters I care about and not enough plot to interest me. So, let’s see what this book is about.

Jean le Flambeur is a thief who is currently in prison, but not just any type of prison. This one uses game theory to try and get the prisoner’s to learn to co-operate. But some prisoner’s don’t want to learn the rules. Jean’s life is changed when Mieli breaks into prison to break him out and remember something that he left on Mars. Mieli sets up a series of thefts that she needs Jean to do, each one a little more difficult than the one before. But for master thief Jean le Flambeur, it’s a fun game to play and that keeps him from trying to escape from Mieli.

Isidore Beautrelet is a detective who is hired by a rich Martian man to find out why Flambeur left him a message (in an inner sanctum that few have access to) about attending the rich man’s party. The big problems are that Flambeur doesn’t remember leaving and Isidore might be up against a villain and technology that can stop him from solving this mystery.

The good part of this is the characters are interesting and there is a lot of interesting ideas. Mars has been taken over by an alien race, but they haven’t done anything because they don’t actually understand anything that goes on in the planet. The Martian society is very different than anything I’ve seen before. But Rajaniemi does a poor job introducing the reader into this world. Everything has to be determined by context, but there aren’t enough clues to determine the context for a long stretch of the book.

The characters are for the most part blank slates for the plot to bounce off. We are told that Isidore is a great detective and we see him solving mysteries. But there is no explanation given as to how he does it or what makes him a great detective. Jean le Flambeur is a little more drawn out, but his erased memory makes it so we don’t ever really know him.

Overall, the book is decent with some fun ideas and a lot of great sequences, but at times I felt like I was reading a series of semi-connected scenes instead of a novel. I do think Rajaniemi’s writing is good and he has a lot of good ideas. He definitely needs to work on his execution, as well as his characterization and smoothing out the plot. I wasn’t thrilled with The Quantum Thief, but I’ll definitely be looking forward to further Rahaniemi books. Mildy Recommended.