The tone and pacing of this book got off to a rough start for me, especially right on the heels of Network Effect. The novel length for that book gave it so much more space to have intertwining threads and deeper relationship building amongst the characters, and this returned to the more breezy "down to business" style of the earlier novellas, but at the same time felt draggy, somehow. Once the action really started to pick up, though, I was totally hooked in because this brought out my favorite elements of the series: ART and Murderbot's relationship, Murderbot grappling with the conflict between its robot side and its begrudging human aspects, and Murderbot's prickly and unexpected emotional relationships with its humans. The last 25% had me at the edge of my seat, even though I read this book as an audiobook less than a year ago! I do hope that new books in this series tread some new ground, which I think there are plenty of avenues that have been opened up with the way this book closes. SO glad that I re-read this whole series, and also read it in chronological order rather than publishing order this time around.