Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Ester’s thrilling debut opens centuries into the solar system’s future with the murder of its most powerful man, Archer Lenox-Pileser, aka LP, the genius behind sentient technology. The culprit is his former bartender, Verden Dotnet, or V-Dot, who ensures that LP has no resurrecting backup files and swipes a halo device recording of LP confessing to heinous crimes. Now on the run and desperate to get the halo cache into the right hands, V-Dot hitches a ride through space with an aged sentient space ship, TR-8901. One of the first sentients that LP created, it’s not as advanced as the later models that V-Dot must dodge as the authorities and LP’s vengeful niece, Cloey, give chase, and war brews between humans and sentients. Ester complicates V-Dot’s cleverly plotted escape adventure with flashbacks to how he ended up in this position and crescendoing conflicts between him and the increasingly suspicious spaceship. With meticulous technical detail, abundant local color on various space stations and Martian locales, and sharply drawn characters, this sprawling novel will appeal to both hard sci-fi fans and readers looking for thought-provoking insights into an all too possible future where humans and AI must find an effective symbiosis if both are to survive. Ester should win plenty of fans. (Nov.)

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Archer Lenox-Pilser (aka LP) is a visionary hero to most of the galaxy, though he is the root of all evil to others. LP has lived over four centuries with the help of biological backups and mental transfers. And now he's been assassinated, permanently. V-Dot, a young man with a checkered past, most recently in the Lenox-Pilser family employ, has killed LP to cover a theft. With his identity obscured temporarily, V-Dot has to get off Mars and away from the authorities so he can get what he stole into the hands of someone who can expose LP for the monster he was, especially regarding his treatment of those sentenced to the virtual environment known as the Island. Fans of a far-flung, cyberpunk future of sentient spaceships and machines and beings of varying degrees of consciousness will enjoy Ester's debut, as V-Dot escapes across the frontier and has adventures aboard well-known spacer vessel TR-8901.