You had the feeling he was tired of the Corey character some time ago, hence the retirement. He should have “done away” with the character and not written this. For such a wonderful author you can see that he’s “done” with John Corey and should have permanently retired him a couple of books ago. The book is not worth having his name on it, and was a horrible read. Too bad to, because some of the early ones were brilliantly written and entertaining, this was painful to read and hard to follow.