The Skinner is another book in the same Polity universe as Gridlinked, though it appears to be more or less self-contained. It doesn't share any characters with the other book, though it does share bits of technology and a general attitude to the world.
The book is set on Spatterjay, a planet with a complex and improbable ecosystem that's designed to allow the author to construct ridiculously gory ways for the characters to suffer and/ or die. The dominant creature in the world is a "leech," that infects its prey with a parasite that confers a sort of immortality. People who are bitten by leeches become extremely strong, insensitive to pain, and nearly impossible to kill, so a bloody-minded author like Asher can have great fun with it.
Spatterjay is also the former base of operations for a particularly nasty gang of pirates, who also dabbled in the slave trade, selling humans to the alien Prador, who basically ripped their brains out and turned them into technological puppets. Many years in the past, the pirate gang was broken up as part of a larger war between humans and Prador, but now a number of characters have come together on Spatterjay to settle some old scores.
This is basically like an Iain M. Banks Culture novel without the tasteful sense of restraint. If you're not comfortable with blood and gore, stay well away from this. If you're in the mood for the sort of book where a character gets skinned alive and survives, though, it's good fun. I read it on an airplane, so it was just about perfect.
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