Search - Undertow

Assassins are hard characters to write about with any degree of sympathy but Bear has managed it. Undertow is about one such person and the interesting world that he lives in. Lots of good villains, people just trying to survive on a company world, and an indigenous population doing their best to get these humans off their world. Lots of action with lots of interesting characters.

I'm finding myself having to revise my opinion of Elizabeth Bear. I read her "Blood and Iron" for my book club in 2006, and really didn't like it very much. But I was told, "Her sf is much better than this venture into fantasy" - (I should mention here that I have this vague feeling that I then read 'Carnival', I think around June 2007, but I appear to have neglected to review it and I can't remember it, which is really not good. Although I have another vague feeling that I liked it.) Anyway, so this month I read 'Undertow' and actually really really liked it. It reminded me of Phyllis Gotlieb's 'Flesh and Gold' - which was one of my favorite books of last year's reading. Like that book, this book deals with the exploitation of a peaceful aquatic race by planetary colonists, but it's definitely its own story.
Greene's World is a planetary backwater, considered to be a peaceful place by many, a place to escape the vicious politics of 'Central,' a way to avoid the past. The main industry is a mining operation, where most of the workers are an aquatic, frog-like native species, generally considered to be sub-human and pre-industrial by the human colonists of the city of Nova Haven.
But the politics of Novo Haven are not so non-existent that there isn't enough work for Andre Deschenes, a pure-business assassin-for-hire, who justifies his work to himself by believing that the people whom he is hired to knock off would be killed by someone else if he didn't do it, likely in a less humane manner.
But when Andre is hired to knock off a woman who is suspected to be involved in trying to foment a revolution amongst the natives - and who also happens to be a close friend of Andre's girlfriend - he is unwittingly drawn into a web of interplanetary politics, hidden exploitation, an unknown alien culture, new technology, and a suspicion that Greene's World is more important than Central has let on - indeed, the very existence of humanity's interplanetary empire may depend on it.
Highly recommended.