Light From Distant Stars is a very hard to place novel, and if you're an impatient reader you likely won't be able to get very far into this one. It starts out swinging for the fences and seems to shape up as a run of the mill murder mystery, but the constant flash backs keep you guessing and hinting at something more underneath the story itself. As other reviewers have mentioned, the flash backs do slow the rate of story down, and I was at times wanting to skim over chapters to keep on going with the main plot. However the regular recollections add a lot of background and depth to the story and it's characters. The book is well written even clever and oddly left me nostalgic, but I wasn't blown away.