I have been reading Sawyer’s books for a long time on-and-off. This one I acquired recently and got inscribed to me when I met Rob at Balticon this year. I just got to the book this week and finished it in a couple of days.
Like all of Sawyer’s books, it takes an interesting premise and creates an engaging story around it. I will say that while I figured out one minor plot point in advance, I missed a couple of biggies, which makes for wonderful reading!
The only “negative” point I’d have about this story in particular is that some of the details hinge around the O.J. Simpson case from 1995. This is a case of “in 1997” this stuff was fresh with everyone; however, I never watched a moment of the trial and to this day still don’t know a lot about most of those involved. It’s a minor quibble as I remembered enough, but not as much. I had a similar feeling about the WWW trilogy because of the tech involved, some of which I never used, but it was cutting edge when written.
One of these days I’m going to have to print off a list of Sawyer’s novels and figure out which ones I have missed reading. If you didn’t know, Sawyer now controls most (if not all) of his backlist and it’s easy to find his stuff at sfwriter.com