Zia’s gloved fingers jabbed out the control sequence again, but she knew it was futile: the hab was dead this past year. She’d been sent from Central to discover how, why.The author ran a contest several years ago offering free copies of this book to the the three people with the most interesting namesakes as revealed by Google, and of course I was up for that challenge and won. The book took a few weeks to reach me from Australia, and it took me a lot longer to get around to reading it. It's a collection of short stories, most of them very brief indeed, with a bit of a tendency to go for last-minute twists or punchlines (à la Asimov, but a little better, which is not difficult). There are several about near-future detective Gordon Mammon investigating various murders. The two that stick in my mind are "Running Lizard", which takes the unpromising concept of were-dinosaurs in the present day and carries it off very well, and the non-sfnal "Scratched" about a little girl, her brother and a mouse. I will keep an eye out for more of Petrie's work. You can get it here. (See author’s note about availabilty in a comment to this post.)
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next in that pile is Hybrid, by Shaun Hutson.
