Iain Banks

Stewart Gilmour must confront his past when he returns to Stonemouth, Scotland, for the funeral of a local patriarch during a supposed temporary truce between crime families.

Suspected of involvement after the Regimental High Command is destroyed as they prepared to go to a new level of existence called Sublime, Lieutenant Commander Vyr Cossont must find a nine-thousand-year-old man to clear her name.

Surface Detail is among Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, a breathtaking achievement from a writer whose body of work is without parallel in the modern history of science fiction.
It begins in the realm of the Real, where matter still matters.
It begins with a murder.
And it will not end until the Culture has gone to war with death itself.
Lededje Y'breq is one of the Intagliated, her marked body bearing...

Overview: The Culture-a human/machine symbiotic society-has thrown up many great Game Players, and one of the greatest is Gurgeh. Jernau Morat Gurgeh. The Player of Games. Master of every board, computer and strategy. Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel and incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game-a game so complex, so like life itself that the winner becomes emperor. Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh...

When sex slave Lededje Y'breq is murdered by a politician on the planet Sichult, the artificial intelligence running one of the Culture's immense starships resurrects her so she can seek revenge. Meanwhile, the Culture is uneasily watching the conflict over whether to preserve virtual Hells for the souls of "sinners" or give them the release of death.

In Scotland, a self-appointed executioner dispenses justice to fit the crime. Thus the lenient judge who let a rapist go is punished by being raped, while a man who killed is killed in turn.

Sixteen years old, Frankie has developed behavioral patterns involving the ritualistic killings of animals and insects to help predict daily events. As each successive day pass, Frankie receives phone call from older half-brother, Paul, who has escaped form an institution and is working his way home.