It is a sci-fy but read more like a mystry/romance
quite involved story - it encompasses science & archeaology. Benford is a good storyteller with a knack for dialog.
more science than fiction, but a good read.
Indiana Jones meets Particle Physics, June 13, 2004
Reviewer: a reader (Bloomington, IN USA)
Perhaps I'm biased because I like Benford's style: I couldn't put the book down. I read it straight through, just stopping once for lunch. It's not Benford's best book because his others are all so great, but it was much better than I expected after reading the other reviews here. Benford mixes in plenty of realistic science, archeology, and university politics with the action of the plot. At the end of the book, an interesting "Technical Afterword" puts the sci-fi in context with "real" physics.
My favorite line from the book is typical Benford: "He had noted that the noise in a room rose as the square of the number of people in it..."