It's a classic Resnick space western. If you know what that means, then you've got a good idea what you're in for. If you don't, then I STRONGLY recommend reading Santiago first (for fairly obvious reasons, this book contains massive spoilers for the original). Return doesn't quite measure up to the original Santiago, but is still an excellent read, packed with the larger than life personalities that populate Resnick's Inner Frontier, but a few of them come across as repeats of earlier characters. This is clearly deliberate in the case of Dante, who seeks to carry on Black Orpheus' work, but Tyrranosaur Bailey comes across in some ways as a repeat of Manmountain Bates, and Waltzing Matilda's introduction bears quite a resemblence to Mouse's in Oracle. For me the biggest frustration was inadequate proof-reading. I lost count of the typos: a couple of worlds get their names misspelled, a character mentions the Democracy covering "50,000 words", etc. Ten years since publication, these simple errors should have been cleaned up long ago.