ast seen in Polaris (2004), Alex Benedict and his female assistant, Chase Kolpath, are dealers in exotic ancient curios living on the far-off world of Rimway in an era that lies on the backside of 15,000 years of human history. Just incidentally, the two form a kind of unstoppable Holmes and Watson team when their curiosity is aroused. And the arousal is major this time around, as they find themselves on the trail of a mystery that's nine millennia dead. Well, the original enigma is that old. A pretty cold case. But it appears that some 30 years ago, two space explorers stumbled upon new clues to the solution of the hoary mystery. Fairly fresh clues that have gone overlooked until Alex and Chase pick them up.
At the dawn of interstellar colonization, in the 2600s, a colony was planted on a world named Margolia. The colonists were secretive, and Margolia's location was never registered. Then the colony disappeared from human records. Now, an artifact from one of the lost colony's ships, the Seeker, has entered the auction market. Sensing a bigger jackpot and the solution to the mystery of Margolia, Alex and Chase begin following one painfully reconstructed link to another. If they succeed, they'll win fame and fortune. And it's those prizes that seem to have arrayed a killer against them, dogging their every step.
Actually, as befitting his Holmesian intellect and temperament, Alex pretty much sits at home and ratiocinates. Poor Chase has to go afield, doing the dirty work. Sure, interviewing professors and interstellar Survey experts is fairly tame. But what about wrestling with greedy burglers, spending weeks among the Mutes, the only other sentients in the universe, and finally going halfway across the galaxy to the ghostly world of Old Earth? Luckily, Chase is a model of competence and ingenuity. This is really her story, and she shines.
Finally, Alex and Chase do find the Seeker and Margolia. And that's when the real mystery begins.
In search of a missing world
I found myself warming to this adventure of what, basically, are a pair of improbable interstellar curio dealers much more than I did to their previous caper, which I reacted to somewhat indifferently. Maybe I'm just getting to be a big softie, but I think not. McDevitt does a better job here, and his core MacGuffin resonates more richly with human pride, ambition, honor and glory.
Once again, let's break down this SF/mystery into its two strands.
The mystery part is both straightforward enough on the surface that the reader is carried along easily from one colorful step to the next, and complex enough below the surface that the reader can't anticipate all the twists and turns (nor the identity of the villain). That's a key to the readability of any mystery novel, whether contemporary or futuristic. The various people that Chase and Alex meet in the course of their investigation are all captivating, in either charming or scary or eccentric ways. And there are sufficient barriers along the way to maintain suspense. Additionally, Chase moves through a plentiful number of venues, thus allowing us to see many aspects of her era.
As for the SF aspects of the tale, McDevitt doesn't stint either. Neat notions are blithely tossed off—such as constructing avatars of dead people from their public records—and the cosmic angles of Margolia's fate are very clever. He takes time to construct a plausible culture for the alien Mutes as well, and Chase's interactions with that culture are sharply portrayed. I do object to a high-tech world where disk drives continue to "hum" and "whir." Jeez, this culture uses nanotech in the construction industry and they still can't make a non-spinning disk drive? But such minor cavils aside, McDevitt does build up a solid portrait of his far future, with especially good emphasis on what it feels like to live above such depths of history.
Alex's presence offstage for the majority of the book is not actually a hindrance, as Chase is cuter, funnier and more interesting. When Alex does appear, it's nice to see that his calculated self-interest is really a mask for more noble and altruistic motives.
In the end, the two strands of deduction and speculation merge fruitfully in this ultimately quite intriguing adventure.
