This book was a lot shorter than I had expected. Having managed to get through Xenocide and Children of the Mind, both Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon have been rather short.
This may be because the idea is fresher and much more concise in Card's mind.
In any case, it was fairly sharp, though some of it was managed far too easily, in my mind. We've moved a long way from the Worthing books.
Shadow of the Hegemon precedes two more books (which have not been fully named yet), one about Bean's final days, and another about Peter Wiggin's control of the earth as Hegemon.