I really enjoyed this book, it might be one of my favourites in the whole series this far, A lot of the good stuff from the other books are there, lots of characters that I know pretty well, since we already spent 5 books before about them, this time we have some first contact, some action, and like before, a lots of politics.

How Cherryh did the communication with aliens was really well done, and it's really nice to see that it's dealt well with for once :)