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While I gave Dark Matter and Recursion high marks, this one gets 3 stars. I think Blake has learned how to pace a novel, and his ideas are much more arresting in his later books. The ideas, setting and characters of Abandon were interesting enough, but after awhile, the scenes started to blend. Too many chase scenes, too many scenes of people suffering, and too much jumping back and forth through time. Also, the introduction of a totally new adversary halfway through felt repetitive � not good for a book that's 500 pages long.

Also, I was expecting something unusual and supernatural, not based on the horrors of greed (which I find pedestrian). There were hints of a reason for several characters (view spoiler)[to be unbalanced, such as lead poisoning (hide spoiler)], but nothing came of it.

One final quibble: The Old West language and slang was difficult to decipher. I doubt the westerners spoke ONLY in hard-to-parse slang; they must have used regular words sometimes! It felt like Blake wanted to use every skosh of his research, leaving none to "waste." And did you know a ramada is not just the name for a chain of hotels?