Bren Cameron is the paidhi, the one human translator and diplomat allowed contact with the atevi, an alien species that looks humanoid enough to fool you until you notice they don’t form friendships the way we do, their whole social wiring runs on something called man’chi instead, a kind of hierarchical loyalty instinct that doesn’t map onto anything we have a word for. Cherryh spends almost the entire book inside Bren’s head as he tries and repeatedly fails to read intentions correctly across that gap, and I can see why one review called the internal monologue tortuous, because it is dense, it is a lot of a nervous man’s anxious second-guessing.
But that density is the whole point, and I think readers who bounce off it are missing what Cherryh’s actually doing. The atevi aren’t wired the same way we are, and if the book let you understand them easily it would be lying about how first contact would actually feel. The assassination attempt that kicks off the plot barely matters compared to the slower horror of realizing you’ve been calling something friendship for years that was never that at all.
Yes it reads like the middle book of a trilogy even though it technically isn’t, loose ends everywhere, clearly setting up more than it resolves. I don’t mind. Once Bren’s paranoia synced up with mine somewhere around the halfway point, I was fully in, and the ending left me needing the next book immediately, which for me is the actual test of whether a slow book earned its slowness. It did.