SF. Another very good story by a good story teller. First contact leads to a hijacking of the aliens vessel and a wrong first impression. Kim has to make things right in a tense situation with her own people against her.

a good plot, but much of the characterization feels very dated ( )

119

Another of McDevitt's heroines seeks to determine what happened to her clone sister while she was searching for any kind of alien existence in the galaxy. Every step of the way the heroine finds something, good enough to end the search…but not for her. She ultimately learns: what happened to her sister and the 3 other people in the team; and then she learns how they were killed; and then why they were killed; and then...that her sister screwed up the first human-alien encounter and she spends the rest of the book trying to make amends with the now angry aliens. Good detective story. I'm impressed that McDevitt can create such excellent "who done what, when, where & why" stories that don't rely on a dystopian backdrop necessitating a lot of insane violence. ( )

What would it be like if man made contact with an alien species?

What if misunderstandings occurred and things went wrong?

How could the damage be repaired or could it be repaired?

This is not an easy book to read. In my opinion, the bad ratings here are given by readers that never finished the book. Jack McDevitt labourously develops his space world. The book is sort of a SciFi mystery but McDevitt does not develop the mystery aspect of the novel very well. The mystery is there alright, unknown explosion wipes out a community, disappearance and deaths of crew members of a space ship whose goal is to search for life in the universe. But there is no tension or clues that grab the imagination of the reader for almost the first 200 pages of the 500+ page book. If McDevitt was a new author for me I would have probably set this book aside after a normal 100 pages.

But the book picks up in interest after 200 pages and by 300 pages NOW it becomes a page-turner and ends with the reader wanting more.

This IS a well written book, though it does drag for almost half the book and requires patience to read it to a satisfying end. ( )