I think the trouble here is that this book was inserted into a part of Miles' timeline (a year after The Vor Game) that was already pretty well nailed down. This must be like writing for "Star Trek", where you're constrained not by physical law but by the requirement that nothing change from one week to the next. The book's fun to read, no doubt about that, but it ends up pretty much where it started. We do learn something about Cetagandan society, making them more than the bad-guy empire.

Mirror Dance is my favorite so far, so Cetaganda was a bit of a let-down. But the paperback includes a few chapters of Memory, which is at the loose end of the timeline and looks like something to put near the head of the to-read queue.

Oh, the covers they're putting on Bujold's books have got to go.

eub 11/96