I read this book on recommendation (via his blog) from Orson Scott Card. It actually took me a while to get through it - not a lot of time for reading books that I have to use my eyes to read, now that I have to commute by car and not by bus - and it's the kind of book that requires some attention to things of a historical nature (although most of Alex Benedict's "history" is in our far distant future), and names of people and places are important to keep track of. The stories I usually read are a little more focused to a smaller cast of characters who play into the story, and the most important characters to THIS story are people who died centuries before the story occurs. In fact, this book is almost a "parallel stories" kind of thing, because the story we are being told, one about Alex Benedict and his pilot, Chase Kolpath, is about Alex's quest to find out the real story of a historical character named Christopher Sim who was a hero of mankind's war against a race of non-speaking, telepathic aliens. As Alex (both with and without Chase) travels from world to world seeking answers, I had a bit of a hard time keeping track of the mental list of worlds and people. But in the end, a good story always wins out, and this is a pretty good story. I have every intention of seeking out the second book in the series, Polaris.