The events take place after "The Coming of Shadows" and before "The Long, Twilight Struggle".
The first chapter was slow reading, but I guess I can say that about every book I read?
To the point. This book was an 8 out of 10. Stirling did a wonderful job. The author convinced me that an alien race in the novel was NOT guilty of all the crimes they committed because of how the Narn had exploited them. I guess you could say that I "felt" and sympathized for the aliens :)
Stirling also did well in exhibiting the relationship between G'kar and Londo; however, I found a minor, yet quite irritating writing habit Stirling has. The author pretty much _always_ would describe the Doctor as "dark" - almost every time Franklin was brought into the story, we might see the author writing, "And the doctor's dark face began to sweat" or "Franklin crossed his dark arms." Stuff like that. Okay, well, its a minor thing, but just a wee bit annoying that sometimes takes away from the author's credibility as a first class writer.
On the whole, I recommend the book to the reader. The endings were clean and nice. Unlike a typical Babylon 5 episode which only gets around 40 minutes to tell a plot, the story went into depth on character analysis and detail. But more importantly, I was quite on the edge of my seat (or for this matter, on the edge of my couch as I laid down to read the book). Page after page I wanted to know what was going to happen next in all of the little tinyplots that were developing in the story.
Once again, its rated high by myself, with a big fat curvy 8. And my friends know me not to be a nice "rater" :)