Having read many of the author's books, I was expecting to enjoy this one. The opening situation, a sea trader from the days of King Solomon being caught up in some sort of time storm and shipwrecked off the coast of present-day England sounds fascinating on the surface. What follows, though, is governmental agents from several countries scrambling behind the scenes trying to deal with the situation, which they fear could have explosive political repercussions. So it's potentially a spy thriller, but one moving so slowly that it doesn't work. The story gets bogged down and even buried beneath huge lumps of information and speculation, often in the form of orations masquerading as conversations. I'm not sure whether this is a potentially fascinating story overwhelmed by background material, or a political analysis trying to present itself as a story. I did like the characters of Eliezer and the rabbi who becomes his translator, and there were some interesting scenes interspersed with the barrage of geographical, historical, religious and political infodumps. Breaking up huge paragraphs and introducing a little "white space" would have made it more readable, as would some attention to the "talking heads" conversations with little or no dialog tags.