If I weren’t reading this for my book club, I’d probably have put it down relatively early. The first few chapters are so full of info-dumps that I was turning the pages, just hoping that SOMETHING would happen. Thankfully, the book does pick up around the 25% mark, which is good. The story gets reasonably compelling and I was curious about the various mysteries. That said, I didn’t really like either of the two main characters (I was much more interested in all the side-characters and occasional POV characters like Zizou and Apama), and I didn’t feel like there was much character development at all over the course of the story. In the end, I enjoyed the read, but not enough to bother reading the rest of the series, most likely.