The Hound Bridget ban has disappeared, and her employers, the elite espionage agency known as the Kennel, have given her up for lost. Her daughter, the harper Mearana, however, is determined to find her mother, even if she has to enlist a stranger with a mind fractured into seven personalities to help her. Set in the same far future universe as The January Dancer, Flynn's latest novel celebrates the art and artifice of storytelling with language that mirrors the cultural shifts and lost paradigms of centuries. VERDICT With well-drawn characters and a colorful universe, this narrative tour de force brings space opera to the next level and belongs in most libraries.

Veteran SF writer Flynn returns to the world he introduced in 2008's The January Dancer: a human-colonized galaxy thousands of years in the future, on the far side of a dark age that has reduced our era to the stuff of legends and hokey place-names. League superoperative Bridget ban goes missing while searching for an artifact that will protect the League from the Confederacy. When her employers give her up for dead, Bridget's flame-haired daughter, Marana, turns to one of her mother's ex-lovers, scarred and bitter Donovan, whose work for the Confederacy left him with a shattered mind and seven personalities. The pair retrace Bridget's final steps, accumulating allies and enemies—sometimes difficult to distinguish—on each exotic world they visit. Flynn's tale is self-consciously retro in its sensibilities, with florid prose and a straightforward, conventional plot. (Apr.)