Shadow Captain is the second book in Alastair Reynolds's Revenger trilogy. I didn't find is as entertaining as the first novel because the plot early on promises a predictable and very annoying predicament and then moves toward it ever so slowly. I had hard time resisting the urge to skip to a part where the annoyance had been resolved.
Instead of Arafura, the viewpoint character in this one is Adrana. There's a new schism between the sisters as Fura is affected the obsessive behavior caused by the glow fever she contracted from eating a ship's organic cabling. Adrana herself carries some remnants of Bosa's brainwashing process the pirate used to prepare new bodies for her consciousness to somehow transfer to. I assume the novel's name refers to Bosa who's haunting them even beyond death.
The pirate queen (whom I found to resemble Queen Yasmina from Absolution Gap) seemed to have been interested at solving the mystery of the quion stones the Dyson-sphere-like Congregation (formed from the Solar System) uses as its currency. Fura inherits Bosa's massive hoard as well as the mystery.
Fura and Adrana aren't free to go on solving it quite yet because they have more pressing issues. They're understaffed and running low on fuel for the ship's shuttle and other supplies. They can't simply go and dock to a mini world as their menacing ex-pirate ship won't be a welcome sight. The railgun-armed ship had been purposefully decorated to instill fear with spikes and bodies attached to the hull. Her solar sails are also made of the setting's valuable "ghostly stuff" that evades one's sight even when being knowing that it's there.
The solar sail powered traversal is a cool concept I got to think about more while reading this one. I'm not quite sure how it works, though. Obviously the sails will take a sunjammer away from the Sun, and when reeled in, the ship will start falling back -- or will it? If you're going fast enough to move away, would removing the acceleration cause you to start going back in a vacuum? How does gravity even work? One would think that the sunjammers had a secondary propulsion method for moving short distances and such.
A lot of the names for things in English are not what I thought based on the Finnish translations I read. For instance, I believe the Congregation is only referred to as 'Parvi' which means swarm. Also, while 'nielijä' is an exact translation of swallower, I guess due to the Finnish name it never came to me that they're micro black holes. I believe each habitat houses one and that is some crazy technology. How Hannu Tervaharju translates 'for the time being' (I presume) as 'ajan oloon', keeps throwing me off. It's literally the same but I'm not sure anyone actually says that in Finnish. I would instead say 'toistaiseksi'.
The third novel is titled Bone Silence which in the books' setting is a term like radio silence, referring to a situation when a sunjammer's bone reader(s) won't touch the ship's alien skull. While the skull allows to receive communication from other bone readers, it also exposes the ship being out there and the reader might unintentionally reveal information if someone contacts them. The novel's name might also refer to the fact that the Revenger's skull expires at the end of this one.
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