Someone or something is plotting murder on an interstellar scale, and a small company of exiles led by human John Bandicut may be the galaxy’s only chance of salvation. The prospective victims are sentient stars living in the Orion Nebula; half the challenge is simply opening communications. Luckily, Bandicut’s allies and sponsors include robots, noncorporeal symbiotes and the incredibly ancient multidimensional entity Deeaab. The long-anticipated fourth entry in Carver’s Chaos Chronicles (after 1996’s The Infinite Sea) is space opera at its most agreeably and classically science fictional.
With such a large cast and a parallel plot involving a threat to Earth itself, character development is necessarily sketched broadly. Some may find the narrative overly stage-managed, but Carver skillfully rotates viewpoints and weaves the choreography directly into the plot. This installment is a cut above the earlier books and will be entirely accessible to any reader who appreciates high-powered stellar and n-dimensional physics blended with old-school space-faring.
