Rainbow Man

This breezy yet thoughtful book by the author of Arslan brings to mind the works of Ursula K. LeGuin and Orson Scott Card. In the distant future, female starshipper Liss leaves her peripatetic profession to settle on the planet Bimran, a pleasant world with a cheerful populace remarkable for its honesty and probity. But after a few months, Liss begins to sense a distasteful underside to her new home's charms. How is order maintained on a world with no visible government or law? Why do her two attractive male friends frustratingly deny their obvious romantic interest in her? And what role does Bimran's enigmatic religion play in these puzzles? In conversational, powerfully simple prose, Engh creates a rich and detailed culture with understandable, though flawed, reasons for its practices. Her characters are extremely likable and three-dimensional; even the antagonists are sympathetic. The action occasionally bogs down in pedantic debates on religion, but on the whole this is a lively, absorbing page turner. (May)