His entire
Uplift Series is VERY good, but he does have some mildly
infuriating tendencies as a writer. His narrative style is very different from most
Sci-fi. He typically uses a very fractured narrative structure with many
characters (25-30), where every little chapter (sometimes as few as 5 pages) ends in a minor
cliffhanger. Sometimes he won't return to that cliffhanger for another 50 pages or so, at which point he sometimes does a quick
gloss of what the
resolution for it was, or maybe only refers to it in passing. Because of this, his books can be
confusing and hard to get into in the beginning, then rapidly accelerating towards an awesome
climax/resolution.
Don't read the Uplift series if you are looking for tight, all-wrapped-up-in-a-neat-
package endings, though. The big questions at the beginning of
Sundiver remain through the end of
Heaven's Reach. The first 3 books of the series (
Sundiver,
Startide Rising,
The Uplift War) can be read as standalone books, but the others really have Startide Rising as a
prerequisite.