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Jack McDevitt has been a Sherlock Holmes fan since he was a teenager, although he reports that Holmes-style mysteries, whodunits, are not his favorite style. Jack encountered Gilbert Chesterton's Father Brown tales a few years later and they ultimately became the prime influence in his science fiction. The issue with Father Brown was never a question of who committed the murder, but rather what in heaven's name is going on here?Why does an astronaut, in "Cathedral," sacrifice her life to collide with an asteroid that she knows poses no threat to the Earth? Why does a scientist who's designed an actual working AI in "The Play's the Thing," hide what he's done? How is it that the lives of two people working at Moonbase in "Blinker" depend on a quasar?In "Lucy," Jack shows us why sending automated vehicles to explore the distant outposts of the solar system may not be a good idea.