As the story opens, Alex and Chase, his pilot, are presented with an extraordinary archaeological find.  An old acquaintance found something on a shelf in her uncle’s home after he died – a Corbett transmitter, a device used to communicate from a ship in FTL travel.  The device itself is not integral to the story; what it implies, though, is significant. Alex determines that the device was once housed in the Florida Space Museum.  With global warming, Florida has been underwater for thousands of years.  And during the Dark Ages when society broke down, somebody moved the artifacts from the museum.  Many people searched for the lost artifacts from the Golden Age of space exploration but they seemed to be completely lost - until the transmitter was found by a respected archaeologist, Garnett Baylee, who kept it on a shelf in a closet and never reported his find.  This was a mystery that Alex couldn’t ignore – if Baylee had actually found the cache of priceless artifacts, why did only one piece end up in his house, why did he never claim credit for the find, and where is everything else?  Alex and Chase spend a good portion of the story following one clue after another only to keep running into dead ends.

The other half of the story concerns the Capella.  The ship was lost eleven years ago although to everyone on the ship, they only left port a few weeks ago.  Alex’s uncle, Gabe, is on the ship.  The ship is caught in a time warp and only “surfaces” every five years.  Top minds are calculating the time and location of the next appearance and every effort is being made to evacuate people off the ship.  Unfortunately for the 2600 passengers and crew, only a handful is able to be taken off before the time warp grabs the ship again.  Chase gets involved in a massive rescue operation and Alex is consulted for an opinion on a radical theory to stop the ship that may, instead, cause it to be lost forever.

The plot is a solid mystery, with Chase (the POV) and Alex researching ancient history for clues, and running into people who want to stop their investigation.  The time is so far into the future that our present is all but unknown; the greater part of history is still known but the small things are lost – like how people lived, what they thought and why they did what they did.  Interestingly, the author does not spin a fabulous description of an exotic society; rather, people still live in homes (although I imagine it looks a bit different from mine), they still drive to work (but in a very different vehicle), they still have jobs and they still gossip.  The human condition hasn’t changed much although he did stop all war.  So if your tastes run to weird aliens, and super-advanced human societies, this may not be for you.  But if you’re after a solid mystery that touches on events and people tantalizingly familiar, this should do well. ~~ Catherine Book