From Darkest Skies

This novel really flew under my radar (and obviously that of a lot of other WWEnders) when it came out, despite being from Gollancz, and despite it being a really good book.

The worldbuilding here is amazing. The story takes place 150 years after the disappearance of The Masters, a superior alien race which showed up, terraformed large portions of the Earth for some mysterious purpose, and redistributed millions of humans to 37 other colony planets in the galaxy.

Set on one of those colony planets, the book features an intelligence agent whose wife died under mysterious circumstances more than 5 years before. He's scavenged every scrap of video, text, and other transcripts of his wife into an AI simulacrum of her personality, with the intent of finding out what really happened.

And so the protagonist comes back to the planet to resume his job as an intelligence investigator, only to be faced with diverse, seemingly-unrelated murders and mysteries which eventually coalesce into a larger, frighteningly-interconnected whole.

I found this novel so interesting that I was really surprised at the lack of buzz about it. I highly recommend both it and its sequel, which does not disappoint.