I feel bad to give this only one star because I love this author. Unfortunately, this was not my kind of book. This is a political thriller/conspiracy novel. (Not my thing typically) The setting is an alternate reality or "mirage" if you will, where everything is opposite of the world as we know it. 9/11 has become 11/9 and the World Trade Center Twin Towers are located in Baghdad. Keep on with the opposites game and you can imagine where this is going. There are so many characters introduced, it was hard to keep up. Ruff used the tool of "Wikipedia" type entries between the chapters to give background which was a clever thing to do in theory, but ended up boring me more than informing me. Not Matt Ruff's best work.