Shadow of the Scorpion

Just finished reading Neal Asher's Shadow of the Scorpion.
An excellent insight to, and deepening of Asher's main Polity character, Ian Cormac. This is a twinned and then intertwining tale of Cormac of him at age 8 or so, and as a young man just having joined ECS, Earth Central Security. Everyone's parents shape their lives, and in Cormac's case, probably more than usual in a sense.
I particularly enjoyed seeing how a young, little trained Cormac gets out of some fairly bleak situations as we see how he starts to develop into the character we love in the other Cormac novels. Damn, he's one hard bastard when he needs to be, but we also see him suffering, and wondering about his hardness too.
Gore. Classic Asheresque gore. Unrelenting violence. Destruction. CTD explosions. Finishing with a fantastically gruesome death of the baddie. What's not to like?