Review: A rich tapestry, with occasional snags.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 6, 2013
I enjoyed this book.  The prologue and early chapters seemed like unrelated vignettes, but their story lines eventually wove together and formed a coherent whole.  Mr. Scott teasingly revealed hints and details as his tale progressed, with a final "chalk talk" explanation around Ch. 62 (if I recall correctly).  While our protagonist, Janus Owens, was almost a stereotypical ex-cop PI, he was competently and sympathetically portrayed.I just wish Mr. Scott had employed a competent copy editor before releasing this book.  It wasn't as bad as many self-published works I've seen, but the errors did reduce my enjoyment and lost him a star.  There are many places where words are obviously missing or in the wrong order.  Commas sometimes seem to be sprinkled at random, or at least without any systematic knowledge of their function.  The occasional malaprops are also distracting:  "Proscribed" does not mean "prescribed."  "Principle" does not mean "primary," and it's consistently misused in this book. (There are other examples, but these illustrate the point.)The science occasionally got silly.  As Kymer has already pointed out, a ship in space doesn't have a "top speed."  The repeated references to their having top speeds that were faster or slower than those of other ships raised chuckles, but made it hard to suspend disbelief.These are relatively minor flaws, and won't keep me from reading Mr. Scott's work in the future.  However, they reduced to three stars what might otherwise have been a four-star book.