You know when someone accomplished in non-literary fields, someone very intelligent, says they're going to write a novel? And the descriptions are fine, and the dialogue is fine, and the characters are fine, and the ideas are fine, and the cliffhangers are fine, and maybe there's a liberal heaping of esoterica, in this case many many Latin phrases, and maybe it follows that escalating plot curve thing to a tee, and maybe Chekov's gun ends up going off, and at first glance it all appears to be fairly competently put together? And even the writing itself as a whole seems perfectly fine, everything except for the sense of joy experienced by the reader, which falls jaw-droppingly flat? This book does that. The joy part, it turns out, is screamingly difficult to engineer. One star.