When I first started this book I found the story to be a bit confusing. It jumped around between characters that were separated by massive distances and years of time. Eventually, though, all the characters came together and the story became easier to follow. This story is set 500 years in the future when space travel and neural implants are commonplace but intelligent alien races are not. One of the main characters is a man who is obsessed with researching a particular extinct alien culture. The other main characters are obsessed with this man for various reasons including being blackmailed to kill him and needing his medical expertise to cure a particularly nasty plague. Of course all of these obsessions are mutually exclusive and major conflicts arise.

The writing style was very interesting and the author's large vocabulary had me reaching for my dictionary fairly frequently. There was also quite a bit of complex physics involved in the book, but it wasn't necessary to understand the physics to follow the story. I was never bored while reading this book, but until the end I never felt that I "just couldn't put it down."

My biggest complaint about the book was that the author had a tendency to make statements about his characters and situations but then not follow them up with any supporting evidence. For example, one of the characters was described as being incredibly arrogant, but throughout the novel he never did anything that struck me as being particularly arrogant. Similarly one of the characters described a situation as being the most horrible thing he could imagine, and yet when this situation actually occurred, it didn't seem horrible and the same character didn't seem to mind it. Another complaint I had about the book was the author's tendency to make statements such as "And then she answered all his questions and it changed everything," without telling the reader what the answers to the questions were or why it changed everything. I found being repeatedly left in the dark while characters were let into the loop to be very frustrating. Of course this helped to build up the suspense and when the reader finally does find out what the big secret is, it's a doozie.

So although this book started out slowly, it ended with a thought-provoking bang. While this book doesn't beg for a sequel, it has two--Chasm City and Redemption Ark and they are both now on my to-read list.