This book was the hardest book for me to put down in a while. The funny thing is I don't know exactly why that was. It doesn't strike me as a great book, but I found myself sneaking time to keep reading to get to the end in a way that I can't remember doing with another book in quite a while.

Anyone who reads this far into the series is probably at least somewhat bought into the Pendergast universe. This book feels like a bit of a love letter to the fans in that it revolves around the relationships Pendergast cultivated in the prior books and relies on your familiarity with those pasts to infuse some scenes with meaning beyond what is in these pages. While I am not generally a fan of such sappy ideas, it works in this book. It works because while these known relationships add gravitas, this book remains driven primarily by its own action-oriented plot rather than on some cloying sentimentality.

Diogenes is a worthy super villain, and other than his and Pendergast's preposterous general capability and competence, there aren't really any "unnatural" elements to this book (at least not that really matter to the plot).