I'm sorry, Blue, I know how much you enjoy Alex's work. They are a good writer, their books are engaging to read, that's for sure. Unfortunately, Into Charybdis just didn't click with me, it never quite came together to me. Which is doubly frustrating because I enjoyed Cold Forge very much. It was tightly written, plot, characters, tone, setting - everything added up while Charybdis felt very disjointed for me. TCF had great balance of Aliens parts and corporate espionage parts. And I never felt I was preached by it while I can't say the same about Charybdis. Call it cultural, national, ethnical ignorance or whatever but that story wasn't something I wanted in an Alien story
Long story short, that book just wasn't my cup of tea