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2.0 out of 5 stars
Not Very Good
November 9, 2010

Jack McDevitt's "The Devil's Eye" has problems:

- The writing is done from the point of view of the supposed side-kick Chase Kolpath, but the supposed brains of the outfit is Alex Benedict. The end result of this is that most the the activities are described well, but the thought processes leading to them are not.
- Even though she's supposed to be the side-kick, most of the story actually revolves around Chase. Alex could have been replaced with an inflatable dinosaur and it would have made hardly a ripple in the plot. There's almost no character development (or character, at all) with either character.
- The first half of the book is a mystery investigation that covers a good part of a planet with the pointless introduction of multitudes of sites and characters. Once the mystery is solved, the remainder of the book turns into a juvenile treatment of politics and the military in an effort to solve a crisis. Except for the initial victim, Vicki Greene, there's really no connection between the two plots.
- And, finally, once most of the problems are moved out of the way, McDevitt finishes the book by skipping ahead in time and providing little summaries of what happened in the course of avoiding that big crisis. The stuff he skips over really should have been the meat of the book.

So, overall, I have to rate the book at a Not Very Good 2 stars out of 5. If you have to read it, get it from the library.