Judas Unchained

I read this back to back with Pandora's Star. The first book is better, it contains most of the world building and fun hard sci-fi. Half of this book is consumed to a detective story, Hunting the Bad Guy, only the book fails at the detective story trick of dangling the clues out to the reader to keep them interested. Also too much emphasis on the soap opera side of space opera in this book, all the silly characters running into each other and squabbling and coupling and blah blah. Very tedious. The core plot itself, the main story, was engaging and fun and certainly held my attention. But I could have done with 300 pages instead of 1200.