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This is a direct sequel to Alliance Rising; you could read this alone, but reading that first would be highly recommended.

That said, while Rising left off on a cliffhanger, nothing about that gets resolved here. It will take time for Galway to make her trip, and for the fallout from that to happen. Meanwhile, some of the crew is stranded, and Finity’s End, the ship that has spearheaded the Merchanter’s Alliance, has them and loose ends to wrap up.

The book starts with Finity’s End on arrival at Pell station. This introduces a few themes, one of which is a somewhat deeper idea of how Cherryh’s hyperspace drive works than we’ve gotten elsewhere. The plot proper starts once we’re actually on Pell. It is a rich station (at least by the standards of anything outside of Earth), but things quickly go from seeing the sights to finding products that just shouldn’t exist there.

This quickly blows up into the main structure of the book, and then adds a complete new layer to the problem presented in Rising. Considering how all the focus had been on a few things in that novel, and the consequences of the end of that book, seeing an all-new element thrown in was a very good ratcheting up of the stakes.

On the other hand, we are back to lots of detail examination of character thoughts while they work through some complicated things with a lot of possibilities. This has always been Cherryh’s strength, and main point, in writing, but it does mean a lot of repetition, and drags things out longer than they should go. Unlike the last half of Rising, we don’t get any real breaks from this, and while the novel is overall quite strong, it does suffer from being all internal thoughts. So, not quite as refreshing as the first one, but still very good, and continuing to explore a part of her SF universe that has been part of the background from the beginning. And in need of… at least one more book to finish off the story.