I picked this book up while on vacation on a recommendation from a bookstore employee. That was a mistake. The pacing is awful. The author takes the entire first half of the book to set up the plot (which is fairly thin anyway, and shouldn't take one quarter of that amount to set into motion). If the characters had been explored and expanded, that time would have been well spent. Unfortunately, the characters seem flat and unengaging throughout the book.This novel feels like a short story that has been padded unmercifully into a much longer work. I certainly will not pick up the sequels.