(This review was written several months ago, before I launched the review site)
I just finished reading Finder, by Suzanne Palmer. It wasn’t the absolute best sci-fi I’ve ever read, but it was definitely worth reading, and I’m planning on picking up the sequels whenever they come out. I suggest this book for anyone who enjoys clever heroes and sci-fi war-and-criminals stories, in a universe set somewhere in the middle of the sliding scale of sci-fi hardness.
The plot synopsis is simple: Fergus Ferguson is a repo man visiting an alien star system to retrieve a stolen spaceship. Which happens to be in the possession of a local warlord, who’s involved in a precarious power balance with four or five other local powers. Without getting too deep into it, Fergus’ actions end up triggering one of those cascading law-of-unintended-consequences chains of mayhem and destruction that I love in my genre fiction plots, quickly turning everyone involved against each other and making the system a very dangerous place to be.
Mild spoilers in the next paragraph, as I start analyzing the story:
The book starts with a violent inciting event that I don’t think works as well as it should. All of the important actions in the scene are taken by other characters; our protagonist is basically along for the ride, and we don’t get a good sense of his personality or abilities until he leaves these new characters that he’s met and sets out into the system on his own. Once he does, however, I discovered to my delight that Fergus is the sort of guile hero that I love reading about, and solves all his problems with clever tricks, technical know-how, and occasional fisticuffs.
There’s a lot about Finder that I really, really like. I love how specific the setting details are, and I love how every little twist is foreshadowed in a way that makes absolute and complete sense. I love the clever tricks that Fergus comes up with, and once I started figuring out his character more after the cold-open intro, I really liked the character himself as well.
There were a few niggling flies in the ointment that keep me from putting it on wall of absolute favorite sci-fi, though. The characters all have a very bad habit of saying what they’re feeling instead of showing it, especially when it comes to the central themes of friendship and survivor’s guilt. It can feel a bit saccharine at times, which is weird for a book where children get executed by brutal space mercenaries at least twice that I can recall offhand. Also, I would have preferred for either 1) the aliens’ motives to have made more sense, or 2) for the aliens’ motives to have never been explained, because as things stand they’re a bit too obviously there just to act as a deus ex machina. It’s not bad enough that it ruins anything in the story, but it’s definitely bad enough that I noticed.
Maybe the author will be exploring the aliens more in the sequels. Which I’m definitely looking forward to, because despite all I just said in this paragraph I want to reemphasize, again, that I quite liked this book. You should read it.