Description:

### Review Currently resident in Spokane, Washington, C.J. Cherryh has won three Hugos and is one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed authors in the science fiction and fantasy field. Her hobbies include travel, photography, reef culture, Mariners baseball, and, a late passion, figure skating: she intends to compete in the adult USFSA track. She began with the modest ambition to learn to skate backwards and now is working on jumps. She sketches, occasionally, cooks fairly well, and hates house work; she loves the outdoors, animals wild and tame, is a hobbyist geologist, adores dinosaurs, and has academic specialties in Roman constitutional law and bronze age Greek ethnography. She has written science fiction since she was ten, spent ten years of her life teaching Latin and Ancient History on the high school level, before retiring to full time writing, and now does not have enough hours in the day to pursue all her interests. Her studies include planetary geology, weather systems, and natural and man-made catastrophes, civilizations, and cosmology...in fact, there's very little that doesn't interest her. A loom is gathering dust and needs rethreading, a wooden ship model awaits construction, and the cats demand their own time much more urgently. She works constantly, researches mostly on the internet, and has books stacked up and waiting to be written. This book picks up about a year after "The Pride of Chanur" leaves off. From the very first moment, you're caught up in the plot and furiously trying to turn the pages faster and faster in order to see what's going to happen. But, then, after about 170 pages of extremely well written, tightly packed, emotionally wrenching, pages, right at the very pinnacle of tension, it ENDS! Aaaargh! There's no excuse for this except pure greed on the part of the publisher. This book should never have been published without its sequel, "The Kif Strike Back." I feel really bad giving such an excellent piece of work such a bad rating. But, unless you have the sequel handy (perhaps as part of the "omnibus edition" "The Chanur Saga" (which apparently ends without ITS finish)), I can't recommend you read it. If you've got the sequel(s), definitely read all of them. But, don't get just this book. -- David A. Lessnau (Niceville, FL USA) on Amazon.com