Not far enough along to actually put a rating to it, but I do have a couple of observations:
First,
I don't get why it was necessary for the new A&A officer to spend a dozen pages recognizing that a stone blade with no apparent handle, never found with any evidence of its being attached to a shaft, with a spiked butt, was designed to be used as a sort of
caltrop. I figured it out within the first page or two. Was DRG trying to tell us that the whole A&A staff was a bunch of idiots?
Second, what's with all the info-dumps, telling us about characters that are already familiar to anybody who'd buy the book in the first place? They read like some of the passages in
Mission to Horatius.
That doesn't mean I'm not going to keep reading. Even if I hadn't seen the first ("unexpected continuity") spoiler in this thread, I'd still have plenty of reason to do so. And I'm hoping I'll soon find out why the new A&A officer
But then again, I also managed to plow through Paul Gillebaard's
Moon Hoax, hoping that the author would eventually reveal some plausible motive for why the Chinese would go to the enormous expense and risk of a covert far-side moon landing, and the installation of an automated weaponized industrial laser programmed to shoot down anything entering lunar orbit, just to discredit the United States. (He didn't. And along the way, he managed to produce an absolutely stunning example of how
not to write and market a novel.)