Altered Carbon is a science fiction mystery thriller published almost fifty years after Asimov’s science fiction mystery, the Caves of Steel. Asimov envisaged a future humanity afraid and suspicious of robot intelligence. Morgan’s Altered Carbon future is the polar opposite. Humanity has embraced digital technology to such an extent that even the human mind is completely digitized. Every human after birth is implanted with a cortical stack near their brain stem to store their mind. The human body is now simply an organic ‘sleeve’, and technology exists to enable a person to switch sleeves, downloading their digitized mind into the cortical stack of the sleeve body. Real death only occurs if the cortical stack is destroyed. Death of the physical body or sleeve is considered to be organic damage, more a crime against property than actual murder.

Criminals are no longer sentenced to prison. Instead, they are sentenced to a period of storage, and their body becomes property that can be leased or sold to another tenant.

Laurens Bancroft is a multi-gillionaire, rich enough to have lived hundreds of years. Somebody enters his private estate, unlocks the safe to which only he and his wife have the combination, retrieves a blaster and then blows away Laurens Bancroft’s head with its cortical stack. It should have been Real Death, but this murder attempt fails. Bancroft downloads his digitized mind every forty-eight hours to a backup facility and he has a stack of clones all ready to go. All he has lost is the forty-eight hours of his life. The attempted murder occurred just seconds before the next scheduled download.

Bancroft is convinced that someone tried to murder him but, since he isn’t actually dead, and since there is no evidence of an intruder, the Organic Damage unit rules it a suicide attempt. Bancroft refuses to believe he would kill himself, and hires his own investigator.

Takeshi Kovacs, a criminal sentenced to hundreds of years of storage, finds himself being decanted into a new sleeve, and offered the chance of a lifetime, his freedom, a new sleeve, and money, if he can solve the mystery. It’s an offer much too good to refuse.

Morgan’s Kovacs is about as hard-boiled as they come, pathologically distrusting of authority, immune to pain thanks to his Envoy training, extremely competent when it comes to fighting of any kind, and gifted with Chandleresque metaphors. Chandler also once said that when in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand. Morgan follows that advice to great effect.

Kovacs sets about solving the mystery of who tried to kill Bancroft. In the process he also has to solve the mystery of why Kristen Ortega, DS in the Organic Damage unit, is willing to help, why Miriam Bancroft, Laurens wife, wants him to stop investigating the crime, why his name was given to Bancroft in the first place, whose body it is that he has been given and why, and the unsolved mystery being investigated by the owner of his borrowed body. The body count racks up – and that is Real Death, not just organic damage. Kovacs also has time while doing all this investigating, and causing all sorts of organic damage, to get entangled emotionally with more than one dame.

The mysteries are solved. Justice is done. And questions are asked about what it is that makes a person a person and whether the body that we are in makes any difference.

This is a fast paced procedural with an intriguing science fiction premise and a satisfying set of mystery puzzles. All in all, a great escape from the long, dark, teatime of the soul.