"Gully Foyle is my name.
Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place.
The stars my destination."

Our main character is a bit of an asshole. Well, that's an exaggeration. He's way more than a bit of an asshole, but he's a resourceful one at least. Trapped aboard a wrecked freighter, stuck inside an 8x8 cube of a room for months, subsisting on what meagre rations he salvages during his brief trips into the vacuum of space, he wants nothing more than to leave. Just when he'd almost given up all hope, the sister ship Vorga approaches. Making every sign and signal he can, Gully awaits the rescue that....never comes. The Vorga passes him by, and thus begins a long revenge-fueled quest that pits Gully against huge sci-fi megacorporations, a war between the inner and outer planets, and drives him almost to madness (if he wasn't there already).

I loved the jaunting system that the author fleshed out in this book. Essentially, mind teleportation, at-will, only restricted by your own personal ability. The author carefully constructs a world where everything has decentralized, where new countermeasures need to be created to keep jaunters at bay, that takes into consideration the consequences of being able to teleport in and out on a whim. There's a lot of nice touches here that I wouldn't have considered otherwise.

I really loved this book as it starts out, then slowly cooled on it until I almost wondered why I was still going. There's a lot of loose plot threads that aren't tied up until the end, but the book doesn't really tell you that or guide you in any sort of way, there's a lot of blind faith in a satisfying ending involved. I also slowly started hating Gully Foyle, as he's an incredibly unlikeable character. Actually, most of the people in the story are unlikeable in different ways, but Gully really takes the cake. What brought me around was the ending, and the revelation (thanks to reviewers here) that this is just a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. Gully declares revenge on the Vorga and all aboard her, uses his considerable talents and money (thanks to salvaged cargo from his ship) to carefully construct the perfect revenge scenario, and then runs into problems seeing it through.

But even after all that, I just wasn't able to rate it higher than three stars. It's a nice clever take on the revenge theme, but I wasn't able to get past Gully Foyle as a character. There's also a lot of old sci-fi baggage here as well, so be warned.

The audiobook narrator killed it though, by the way. Highly recommend, if you're looking to listen to this one.