At the start there is a lot less of "High Noon" and a lot more of contextual background of both the Hollywood blacklist in general and of the main characters in the narrative in particular than I perhaps expected, so I guess mostly for that reason it took me a while to get caught up into the story as the author presents it.

Like reality often is, it is a complicated business to relate, and there are a Tolstoyan number of characters involved who need to be presented and made sense of relative to one another. One I was finished, I felt like I had learned some of the history of the Hollywood blacklist and was left to ponder the implications or similarities in what happened then and some of what we see today.