Description:

**The Barnes & Noble Review** Alex Benedict and his executive assistant, Chase Kolpath -- ambitious antiquities dealers from Jack McDevitt's *A Talent for War* (1989) and, more recently, *Polaris* -- are back in *Seeker,* a story in which the two antiquarians search for a legendary lost colony that is both a science fiction thriller and a remarkably complex mystery. More than 9,000 years after an interstellar transport named *Seeker* left an overcrowded and politically repressive Earth with the dream of founding a new society on an unspecified planet, Benedict and Kolpath stumble across a ceramic cup that was once on the now-legendary lost starship. But tracking down how the ancient artifact got from the ship into the hands of a maltreated woman and her thuggish boyfriend turns out to be more than Benedict and Kolpath bargained for -- as their search leads them across multiple star systems and straight into an anonymous assassin's crosshairs. But as the killer closes in, the two courageous antiquarians uncover the jaw-dropping truth about the lost starship and the legendary colony Equally reminiscent of Frederik Pohl's Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Heechee saga (*Gateway, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon,* et al.) and a classic Ellery Queen mystery, McDevitt's *Seeker* will appeal to readers of hard-core science fiction, as well as adventurous mystery fans looking for an out-of-this-world story. And just like *Polaris, Seeker* is characterized by a bombshell of an ending that will leave readers absolutely awestruck. *Paul Goat Allen*