Philip Kerr applies his smart, suspenseful thriller style to science fiction in The Second Angel. In 2069, Earth is devastated by climate change, killer plagues, and scarce resources. P2 is a deadly (but curable) virus that infects almost the entire population. The cure is clean blood, which is in critically short supply and is affordable only to the very rich, who live in protected enclaves and engage in market speculation on the price of the vital fluid. On the moon, sex hotels and high-security prisons share turf with the First National Blood Bank, where uncontaminated blood is kept. Enter Dana Dallas, a crack security systems designer and member of the wealthy, healthy elite. When he finds out his infant daughter needs clean blood to survive, he starts a chain of events that will make him the sworn enemy of some very dangerous people. Dallas teams up with several shady characters to try and break the bank, and Kerr sprinkles the text with "historical" footnotes to help the reader understand the social context of the action. A mostly annoying narrator--part of a badly connected subplot-- explains the immunological and social importance of blood. While Kerr"s ideas and plotting are terrific, his execution is rather stilted. A thug who says things like, "I believe that meaning can be established. Yes, I think it was Sir Karl Popper who said that," might have been a funny character--if everyone else in the book didn"t talk that way. --Therese Littleton