The blurb on the back cover by the San Francisco Chronicle describes this stand-alone novel as "Michael Chrichton meets Robert Ludlum, with a big scoop of The Manchurian Candidate thrown in for good measure.... [it] will keep you guessing." Well, it certainly kept me guessing - among other things, I still can't figure out why Bear switched his first-person point of view midway through the book to a different character, after 196 pages (paperback) of solid writing with the primary character. It may have been the only way to tell that particular part of the story, but it felt incredibly awkward, and the quality of the story went nowhere but downhill after this point. The viewpoint switches a few more times throughout the book.