Gods of Riverworld

Gods of Riverworld by Philip Jose Farmer continues the epic chronicle of the planet called Riverworld, and of the thirty-five billion men and women who woke there one morning, to begin the first day of life after death. Resurrected by the power of an alien race, for reasons they can only guess at, unlikely fellow travelers like Mark Twain, Hermann Goring, and Cyrano de Bergerac wander the banks of a ten-million-mile-long river in search of their makers and the answers to this mystery. Now some of their questions have been answered, and even more raised, by their discovery of the giant tower that rises from Riverworld's north polar sea. Here is the great computer that controls the resurrection process -- and their mastery of that mechanism will make them like gods in Riverworld, with power of life and death over those billions of human lives. But they are not alone in the tower. Strange footsteps in the corridors, attempts on their lives, one "accident" after another, all lead them to an inevitable conclusion; either there is an assassin left behind in the tower -- or one of their band is a traitor!