I finished The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds a few days ago.

Set in the same universe as Revelation Space, The Prefect starts off as a police procedural and ends as a space opera.  The prefect of the title is a kind of police officer, charged with making sure there are no violations of voting rights in a large set of orbital habitats with diverse cultures.  They get drawn into an investigation of an entire habitat being wiped out, presumably by a sub-culture that travels between the stars at slower than light speeds, but ends up being tied into some scheming AIs.

The book moves along well, and is less difficult to get into than Revelation Space.   The characters aren't anything unexpected, or much beyond a set of generic protagonists, but the back story was interesting.  It made me interested to read some of the books that come between these two in this series.