Up until about three-quarters of the way through Polaris, I was going to give the book 4 stars. But the ending dragged on for too long, the final resolution left me flat and wasn’t up to the quality of the rest of the book. The story revolves around the disappearance of the passengers and pilot off the spaceship, Polaris, sixty years before the story takes place. The book is a science fiction/mystery and does a credible job at both genres. The narrator, Chase Kolpath is a spaceship pilot and assistant to the antiques dealer/historian Alex Benedict. Chase is very intelligent and strong, and gets herself and Alex out of several tense situations through the use of both her brains and her physical strength. It was therefore disappointing that Alex figures out the mystery before she does, and has to explain it to her (I figured it out about two chapters earlier). The character development and details of the future were exceptionally good for most of the book, and I will look for the other books in this series to read, but the ending was a letdown, and I have a quibble with the way the spaceship computer is programmed in one scene to lie and attempt to kill. 3½ stars. ( )

Set in the far future, the spaceship Polaris takes a group of rich passengers thousands of light years away to watch the destruction of a sun by another star. The ship never returns. The nearest rescue ship reaches it six days later to find the ship undamaged, but drifting...and deserted. The destruction of the sun wiped out any planets or moons that could have sheltered the ship's passengers.

Nearly sixty years later, the ship has become a legend. The fate of the crew has been the subject of books, TV documentaries and even a yearly convention, which brings forth all sorts of theories. Antiquities dealer Alex Benedict, and his assistant, Chase Kolpath, manage to acquire a few personal items that came from the ship, for their rich clients, just before the rest of the collection is destroyed in a mysterious explosion. The clients report visits from equally mysterious people who want to buy the items for astronomical sums of money. A couple of high-tech assassination attempts convince Alex and Chase that this is not just another rich collector at work. Someone is looking for something among the Polaris items, and that someone knows just what happened to its passengers.

As Alex and Chase get closer to the truth, it becomes clear that everything revolves around a scientific breakthrough made by one of the passengers. A method had been found to not just stop the aging process, but actually reverse it. At minimum, this would force radical changes on humanity, including, for instance, a near ban on any new births.

This is another well-done piece of writing from McDevitt. It is nice and thought-provoking, along with being a really good mystery. ( )

The second book featuring Alex Benedict is despite its science fiction trappings of superluminal travel, AIs and eternal life, a mystery more than science fiction.
Narrated by Benedicts assistent Chase Kolpath the selfreferencing and direct adressing of the reader are reminescent of the Scherlock Holmes mysteries while Alex Benedict share his flowergrowing and mercenary characteristics with Nero Wolfe.
Benedict is an antiquities dealer who is willing to go to extreme lenghts to make his deals and Kolpath is his pilot, assistent and chronicler.
Having bought several items from the spaceship Polaris, whose whole crew mysteriously disappeared in a distant solar system while leaving the ship intact, they find themselves and their customers beset with mysterious strangers.
Amidst several murder attempts they set out to discover what actually happened on the Polaris, and why this matters 60 years later.
An interesting closed room mystery, whose investigation takes Benedict and Kolpath all over the galaxy, to ancient space stations as well as high profile events. The science fiction element is deftly used to construct an intriguing mystery - more believable than many classical detective plots, although the solution became obvious to the reader a lot sooner than for Kolpath and too early to sustain the suspense for the last quarter of the book.
The author seemed to have fun with the concept of antiquities, history and archeology in a time with such a long past, and his inventive use of these, along with his descriptive abilities made his worldbuilding come alive.
The characters lack distinction - the parts in the info dump conversations are indistiguishable, and makes them stand all the more out as info dumps.

If you expect groundbreaking science fiction - which is easy to do when the endorsement on the cover compares Jack McDevitt to Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke - you will be disappointed, but if you like a wellwritten mystery in a science fiction setting, and don't mind a somewhat weak characterization this is a solid read. ( )

I had heard this author mentioned as the heir to Asimov's writing style. I think the description fits. I will be giving his other books a look as well. ( )

Another solid and entertaining read from McDevitt. Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath are an engaging detective duo, and McDevitt has set up an intriguing "locked room" mystery for them to solve. The pace moves quickly, with an effective alternation of action, exploration and contemplation. Don't expect anything profound, although McDevitt does manage to raise some reasonably interesting issues about the potential impact of longevity advances and different variations on FTL travel. Like much of McDevitt’s work, this is set in a far future in which mankind has settled distant stars and seen a series of long lived interstellar political entities rise and fall and be almost forgotten.

I enjoyed the concept that people both famous and not so famous would build VR “avatars” that are available on demand for future generations to chat with about whatever strikes their fancy. The solution to the mystery (which I figured out about halfway through the book) was a bit gimmicky, but this book is more about the journey to the answer than the answer itself. ( )