I was so impressed with the "Priscilla Hutchins" series of books by Jack McDevitt that I started reading the "Alex Benedict" series last month. I've finished the first one, A Talent For War, and I was definitely entertained.
In A Talent for War, we are along for the ride as the hero, Alex Benedict, becomes the heir to a sizable fortune, and an even bigger mystery. McDevitt has created a universe in which man, nine thousand years from now, has spread to a large number of planets in the galaxy. When the story begins, mankind has been united in a "Confederacy" of planets for two hundred years, following its first interstellar war with another species.
McDevitt puts the story in first-person, having Alex speak to the reader as he first resists, and ultimately becomes ensnared by a mystery that has its roots in the founding of the Confederacy. As readers, we learn about that history slowly, as Alex speaks to us as if we already know what every schoolchild of the Confederacy has learned about the mutes, the heroes of the war, and the legends surrounding them.
A surprising amount of the action in the book takes place in library investigation and interviews, though the techniques used for both are science-fiction through and through, with visits to other places made by mental projection and multi-sense holographic techniques.
Ultimately, we learn about the future history of the human race, get caught up in a mystery as complex as many Agatha Christie might write, and ultimately end up facing danger and death.
While it was not as thrilling, and certainly not as science-centric as the previous series, I enjoyed the book, and have heard that the next couple might be even better, so I will definitely continue with the series.
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