As with so many other authors, I first noticed Jack McDevitt when browsing through the SF shelves of my local Borders, and have to give all the credit to the cover of The Engines of God – in the edition I have it's an interestingly textured matte orange and black and stood out quite nicely from its neighbors. The title and the bleak lunar landscape on the cover intrigued me enough to give it a try, and I'm glad I did.

I should point out first of all that if you're not into mysterious ancient alien monuments, you won't like the basis for McDevitt's books about starship pilot Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins. All of them feature mysterious ancient alien monuments or artifacts, and in true Indiana Jones fashion (there's even a dashing adventurer-archaeologist who's explicitly referenced a few times) there are daring escapades surrounding them.

In The Engines of God, all of humanity is fascinated by a race which has left mysterious monuments in out-of-the-way places: an alien figure on one of Saturn's moons, a colossal city-like structure of solid stone blocks in another system, and so on. In search of the Monument-Makers goes famed archaeologist Richard Wald, among others, and Hutchins is the relatively unassuming starship pilot who takes him places. Wald, a team of less-famous archaeologists, and their precious artifacts are thrown into life-threatening danger by corporate greed and disregard for the Progress of Science; Hutchins attempts a daring rescue; and later, using the clues deciphered from the alien artifacts, she is able to divine the mystery of the solid stone non-cities.

So far, so good. There is plot, there are really cool ideas, there are sympathetic protagonists and sufficiently-amoral-as-to-be-evil villains, and it's all done through the unusual lens of looking at past alien races rather than "current" ones. The problem appears when you pick up Deepsix, the next book in the series, which features... mysterious alien artifacts, archaeologists investigating lost civilizations, lives endangered by a demonic outside force, and daring rescue attempts. The situations are juggled around enough, and Hutchins' companions – particularly the MacAllister-Nightingale dynamic – are interesting enough to keep it fresh, but it's a bit like reading the same novel again.

The pattern repeats itself with Chindi, although it's active (albeit ancient) alien artifacts (alliteration applied appropriately) that are the focus of the adventure. Judging from the back-cover blurb for Cauldron, the next one up, it'll be similar: the various elements have changed around, the scenarios and ideas are still fairly novel, and despite all of that it looks like more of the same.

If you like reading SF for the ideas and can get along with xeno-archaeology, it's well worth having a look at the whole series. If you're not so intrigued by that prospect, then do pick up Deepsix -- all the Hutchins books are readable on their own, and Deepsix is the best of the lot so far, with plenty of ancient mystery, cool action, and (more than the others) interesting character development.