Ian Cormac grew up to adulthood through the end of the war between the human Polity as well as the vicious arthropoid competition, the Prador. In Neal Asher’s Shadow from the Scorpion, Cormac is definitely haunted by years as a child memories of a sinister scorpion-shaped war drone and the responsibility of loss he doesn’t remember.

In the years following a war he signs up with Globe Central Security, and is sent out to greatly help either restore or simply maintain order on worlds devastated by Prador bombardment.

There he discovers that although old enemy remains as murderous as ever, it isn’t anywhere near as perfidious or harmful as some of his fellow human beings, a few of them closer to him than he’d like.

Amidst the ruins left by wartime genocides, he discovers in himself a frosty capacity for violence, learns some terrible truths about his personal past and, arranged upon a course of vengeance, tries merely to stay alive.