 I just finished reading this and I believe it's the first Frank Herbert book I've ever read. The story is about a government agent who is trying to catch a wealthy eccentric woman whose activities are threatening to crash the system of warp gates that everyone uses, which obviously would be a disaster. The text of this book is almost entirely dialogue. It's like reading a script of an episode of Dragnet or CSI near the end that started to get rushed and kind of a mess.