The novel “Finder” by Suzanne Palmer was published for the first time in 2019. It’s the first book in The Finder Chronicles series.
Fergus Ferguson was tasked with retrieving the “Venetia’s Sword”, a starship stolen from its makers by Arum Gilger, a sort of local boss of the Cerneken colony, or Cernee for its residents. The colony consists of an uneven group of asteroids and artificial wheels joined by a transportation system.
While Fergus Ferguson is in a pressurized cable car of the transportation system, an attack by Gilger’s men threatens to kill him and “Mother” Vahn, the woman traveling in the same car. Fergus is saved by the woman and ends up in the habitat of the Vahn family, a group of practically identical-looking women who immediately make him think they’re clones. It’s only the beginning of a kind of civil war in the colony with the further complication of the Asiig aliens, whose spaceships start flying closer and closer.
Since 2005, Suzanne Palmer has been writing short fiction and only in 2019 she published “Finder”, her first novel. The protagonist is a Scotsman who took root on Mars and then became a finder, basically a repo man who recovers properties on behalf of their rightful owners. In this case, it’s a spaceship taken using false credentials.
Fergus Ferguson’s idea is simple: arrive in the Cerneken colony, examine the situation, prepare a plan, and return the “Venetia’s Sword” to its owners. Unfortunately for him, he soon discovers that he ended up in a place where the situation is complicated and quickly deteriorating. The consequence is that the spaceship recovery becomes almost a marginal problem.
Like Fergus Ferguson, the reader is thrown into Cerneken’s complex situation and learns about it together with the protagonist. The pace tends to be fast apart from a few moments consisting of dialogue, usually between Fergus and other characters, which is also used to develop them.
The result is a portrait of a complex future in which humanity is spread across the stars but the problems are often the same as the ones existing on Earth today. The Cerneken colony isn’t particularly large but it’s decidedly diverse with inhabitants ranging from lichen farmers to arms merchants. The world-building, with the depiction of that future and in particular of the space frontier with the Cerneken colony, is for me the best part of the novel.
Certain rather dark tones of the story of the civil war that breaks out in Cerneken are tempered by a certain irony by Fergus Ferguson. The protagonist has a complicated past that is slowly revealed, and from this point of view, honestly, I hoped for something better because the dark moments of his past smell of clichés. A certain repetitiveness in the many moments of danger in which Fergus is convinced he is now dead but obviously survives doesn’t help.
The elements of the plot and especially of the protagonist development that left me a bit unconvinced are for me limited compared to the merits of an action-packed story developed for the most part in an environment that is not a planet. One part is set on Mars, and from this point of view, it’s more conventional but, cliché aside, it helps certain developments of the protagonist. The part of the plot connected to the Asiig aliens is the only one that is left without a real resolution, as they remain mysterious.
“Finder” is the first novel in a series but has its own ending, so you can read it as a standalone novel. I recommend it to readers who appreciate adventurous stories with settings in the space frontier, sometimes with a flavor that is somewhat reminiscent of Westerns, that are well constructed.
