Machine Vendetta is the third book in the Prefect Dreyfus Emergency series featuring a officer of the law for a system of floating city states that orbit the planet Yellowstone, and the enemy that wants to destroy everything including Tom Dreyfus. The prefects are, after all, people devoted to their duties, even at the expense of much private life.

The action takes place in "the glitter," a band of about 10,000 space stain like habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone. Conspiracy filled stories of androids, aliens, other humans, or crystal worlds, living dinosaurs, and hyperpigs as shown in this story.I can't recommend this more highly, and though the story line here is essentially a new one there is enough essential background from the previous novels to make it worthwhile for new readers to start at the beginning of the series.

The Panoply is a small but mighty police and peacekeeping organization of which Tom Dreyfus is a high ranking officer.To complicate this febrile situation further, elements from the past have come back to haunt the characters.

I would say that it is similar to and Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel, with a cast of police agents investigating a serious of what look like random crimes, and finding that they are all the same. My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Orbit Books for an advanced copy of this hard science fiction story/ police procedural set in the far future about a group of diverse city states that orbit one planet, and the threat to their continued existence. I’d recommend this series if you want a little more detective sci-fi and not quite as hard sci-fi as his other stuff. Still, once things started popping a little over halfway through the book, I found myself racing through it.Although this is the third book in the Prefect Dreyfus series, and I had not read the previous books, I found "Machine Vendetta" to be perfectly readable, understandable, and highly enjoyable. As Tench’s mentor and friend, Tom Dreyfus is brought in to investigate her death and the events leading up to it - What was the reason for the trip? Others may feel the problems to be of greater severity, but unlike the previous books there wasn't anything here that lessened my enjoyment. It's fun to see more stories set in the Glitter Band and also to be reminded why the Revelation Space Universe is the worst place ever to live. She tells him that another rogue AI, known as the Clockmaker, Aurora’s fierce enemy, is trying to capture her so that he can control the Yellowstone system without opposition.

You don’t need to have read the previous books – enough of the backstories are given along the way to explain to newcomers – but those who have read the previous novels will appreciate what happens more. Four years after the events of Elysium Fire, the relationship between Panoply and some of the habitats in the Glitter Band has deteriorated since we last visited. This novel's ideas are mind-stretching, including a limbo where copies of the dead can be kept and interrogated, and a chillingly mischievous AI that tempts and mocks Dreyfus.The relentless narrative momentum it employs simply underscores the pertinent urgency of that topic. The Panoply is small in number, and at this time low in popularity due to the actions of one agent in an attack on a floating city that lead to many deaths. They're present here, but I think for first time Reynolds has a scene where he acknowledges and intervenes with the identity issues because he knows you're speculating about the identity of a character. I don't know if this is a counterpoint to some of the police abuse stories we've seen recently, but it's hard not to see it as such. There is big trouble in the Glitter Band, the ten thousand habitats of which are patrolled by a force of only a thousand prefects of the Panoply.