I appear to like Provenance a lot more than most readers, and it's mostly in the tension between Ingray's self-conception and how others see her. Ingray is a potential heir to political power, in vicious competition for her mother's favor back home over her brother. Her ambition has brought her to the station of Tyr, where anything is for sale, to bargain everything she owns on the exiled and imprisoned child of her mother's main political rival, who she believes knows a dark secret that could give her family immense political ambition.

Ingray sees herself as dancing along the edge of chaos, a social and emotional wreck desperately improvising to keep from falling into the abyss. The book spends a lot of time in her head, so glimpses of the outer Ingray, a possessed young woman who is scarily good at spotting weakness and jumping at it, is a delight.

The plot has a lot of moving pieces, which ultimately come to a kind of sleight of hand trick, but in a series that tends slow-to-glacial, alien ambassadors, murder mysteries, surprising romances, and a hostage situation on a space station as prelude to invasion, all offer a lot of interesting bits to chew on as the sociological design of Ingray's Hwae culture, focused on veneration of artifacts linked to famous events and people, unfolds.