Description/Book Blurb:

Interstellar antiquities dealer Alex Benedict and his assistant Chase Kolpath travel to the most remote of human worlds and uncover a secret connected to a decades-old political upheaval-a secret that somebody desperately wants hidden.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Review 3 of 5 Stars

Okay, so Alex Benedict is off on another adventure with his assistant Chase Kolpath.  A superstar horror writer, Vicki Greene, has left Alex a message and a load of money, but she came back and had a brain wipe so she can’t tell him what she wanted him to do.  Being Alex Benedict he cannot help but chase down the mystery.

This book actually starts out pretty well, but by the end it was just dragging for me.  They follow an overabundance of leads that go nowhere, get in quite a bit of trouble, and then spend an inordinate amount of time trying to escape from a mostly inescapable place.  They also manage to expose a secret that I think it would have been pretty difficult to keep a secret despite the reasons given in the book for why the secret was able to be kept.

I just couldn’t buy it.  I’ve enjoyed several of Mr. McDevitt’s other books now, but this one just didn’t do it for me.  Sometimes it’s like that.  I have two more of his books on the shelf to read and I’m hoping to enjoy those as I have enjoyed the ones before this.

The author tells a good story and the writing was good, but it just seemed to drag on until I wasn’t as interested in the mystery (the strangely successful well kept secret) anymore and kind of just wanted him to give up and get on to the next case.