The novel “Great North Road” by Peter F. Hamilton was published for the first time in 2012.

The year 2143 begins in a complicated way for Newcastle police detective Sidney Hurst when he arrives on a murder scene. The victim is a member of the powerful North family, which means that it’s a very high profile case. The case quickly becomes more complicated when the wounds suffered by the victim turn out to be the same as those found in a murder that took place twenty years earlier, perpetrated on the planet St Libra, in which one of the victims was one of the most important members of the North family.

Angela Tramelo, who was convicted for that old multiple murder, always claimed that the real culprit was an alien but wasn’t believed because no one found traces of alien presences on the crime scene. The case gets reopened and Angela is put in the custody of the Human Defence Alliance (HDA), which plans to start an expedition to St Libra to investigate a possible alien presence that could threaten the largest producer of bio-fuel and maybe the whole of humanity.