the clone to kill Miles. However, the talks Miles has had with his clone bear fruit. The clone shoots and kills Galen instead, then flees. Complicating matters are Cetagandan and Barrayaran assassination squads (targeting Naismith and the clone, respectively), a Dendarii contingent and the local police, all converging on their location. Miles, with his usual tactical wizardry, is able to get himself, his clone, Vorpatril and Galeni safely away. As an added bonus, Miles arranges for the Cetagandans see him and his clone together, "proving" that Naismith and Vorkosigan are not the same person. By Betan law, the clone is Miles' brother, and Miles is well aware his Betan mother would be greatly displeased if he got rid of his troublesome new sibling. According to Barrayaran tradition, his brother would be named Mark Pierre Vorkosigan. Miles gives the psychologically scarred "Mark" a considerable sum of money and an invitation to claim his Barrayaran heritage, if he wants to—or dares—then lets him go. The delay in payment of the Dendarii funds is revealed to be due to one of Galen's agents on Tau Ceti. As Miles prepares to leave Earth, his mentor in the Dendarii, Ky Tung, announces his retirement to get married and live in Brazil, leaving Miles to run the mercenary fleet without his assistance. Tung also lets slip that he figured out Miles' real identity. Reception Jo Walton, writing at Tor.com, praised Bujold's depiction of "the way politics and technology move and change and interact and things go on outside of the stories"; however, she also stated that it was a poor place to begin reading the Vorkosigan series, because much of its emotional power depended on a pre-existing familiarity with the characters and setting, such that although she "liked it enough to finish (reading) it, and to pick up another book by the same author", she "came to (the) book without already caring, and it didn’t make (her) care." The SF Site, reviewing the audiobook edition, similarly felt that it didn't "really work as an entry point (into the series)", but lauded the inclusion of "ethical issues about identity and personhood and individual rights", and observed parallels to The Comedy of Errors. James Nicoll commended Bujold's choice not to depict future Earth as a dystopia, and noted that Ser Galen's plan failed because it "require(d) many complicated events to happen in the right order at the right