This book is a collection of three novellas each dealing with a separate case but with the final culminating in a definite and satisfying ending. To round it off he has a real human as a butler/chauffeur. Another is a ex Navy seal who handles his security, and a psychologist who reads people for him and advises him in interpersonal dealings. For most work he has a core team of some of his oldest aspects, one is a historian who fills him in on background but also has a soothing voice and manner that helps calm him.

The various skills he needs to solve the quanderies that are brought to him necessitate the large number of aspects he has, for example he has a Hebrew translator, a photographic specialist, a Samoan survivalist, a forensic investigator, and on and on and on. Not quite a fancy private detective but close enough. To pay the bills he consults with people willing to pay steep fees.

Since he has 50 or so of these aspects Stephen’s life is complex and expensive. He also gives each aspect a separate room of their own in the mansion he lives in. The media has fixated on him and his reclusive nature has merely whetted their appetites, with the net effect that he is so famous/notorious that the public is aware of his peculiarities to some extent. The fact that his aspects are invisible to all other people and that others can only hear his side of a conversation when he talks to aspects makes for interesting situations in public. Leeds treats each aspect as a real human and will hold car doors open until they get in, buys meals for them at restaurants, separate tickets and seats for them when they have to travel-you get the picture. We are not talking zombies here but mostly sympathetic humans with unique and frequently bizarre personalities that by book’s end most become quite likable.

The aspects and his relationships with them are the high point of the book. He then externalizes this knowledge into a manifistation of a human being that he calls aspects which only he or another one of his aspects can see or communicate with.

Stephen Leeds, our hero, is able to assimilate mass amounts of data in short periods of time.

Stephen leeds brandon sanderson