Cryoburn – Lois McMaster Bujold

The planet Kibou-daini is obsessed with cryonics – any member of population can expect to be frozen before or just after death (depending on how much you can pay, of course), and these not quite dead citizens still feature in the voting rights of where they’re stored. When one of the cryo-companies tries to expand into the Barrayaran Empire, the Emperor smells something fishy, and sends Miles Vorkosigan in to sniff around.

Naturally, Miles uncovers a whole heap of trouble, which ends up being centered around a boy who loves animals, his missing, frozen mother, and the strange outlaw cryonics community he’s managed to find a home in. The story’s hard to describe if you’re not in the middle of it, but definitely makes you think about how we view death, and how that might change if it went away, or even appeared to go away. I can always count on these books to be interesting.