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Returning from an previous adventure, archaeologist Alex Benedict receives a call from best-selling author Vicki Greene, asking for help and saying that everyone is dead. Benedict tries to contact Greene, only to find she's undergone a full personality wipe--but only after she transferred two million credits into his account. Alex is intrigued and begins to trace the last journey Greene took and to discover whatever drove her or someone else to wipe her personality, effectively killing her.

Before long Benedict discovers that Greene was on the trail of something with large scale political implications for the universe as a whole. The path leads to a planet at the edge of the known universe, famous for its haunted areas. Greene was a best-selling writer of stories about things that go bump in the night, which doubles the intrigue into just what she discovered in her final journey.

McDevitt's fascinating sci-fi novel follows the mold of the Asimov Danell Bailey series, hooking the reader with a murder mystery that opens up the universe he is trying to create and leading to some other, bigger science-fiction issues. At times, were it not for the use of spaceships and other worlds, this story feels like a well written and well executed murder mystery. It's in the second half of the story that some of the bigger sci-fi concepts begin to take over, but not to the extent that we get info dumps or at the sacrifice of the mystery story at hand. The intrigue into what Greene found and how it lead to her death will intrigue you. And along the way, McDevitt does some nice character work and world building.

As a genre, sci-fi has too many books that overstay their welcome either by getting into too much technobabble or following unnecessary plot threads to prove the author knows his or her science. "The Devil's Eye" does neither. Instead it shows off an impressive knowledge of science without grinding the plot to a halt or forgetting why the readers are here in the first place. It stays just long enough to ensure readers will be satisfied by the resolution and it ably sets up the threads to come together in a logical and natural way.