Finder is the first novel by Suzanne Palmer, the winner of the Hugo, Asimov's Readers' Award, and the 2018 WSFA Small Press Award. This is a fun old fashioned space action-adventure with a lot of humor.

The hero, Fergus Ferguson (yes, everyone he meets comments on the name and his aliases all have the same alliteration) is a finder for hire, or, as he puts it, "I have made a decent career out of chasing things and running away." He has been hired to go to Cernee to repossess a space cruiser stolen by Arum Gilger, a junk warlord. Soon after Fergus arrives on Cernee, someone sabotages the cable car system on which he is riding, killing Mother Vahn, who is an enemy of Gilger's number two man, Graf. Fergus makes his way to Vahn's lichen farm, run by what appears to be clones of Vahn, all of whom have names starting with M. One of these young women, the 19-year-old Mari, insists on helping Fergus despite all he can do to discourage her.

With the help of Mari, Fergus makes contact with Harcourt, an arms dealer who is the father of Mari's best friend and has his own reasons to hate Gilger. They concoct a plan to fake an experimental time viewing device--the Light Afterimage Retrieval Device Beta Unit Two (yes, the acronym would be LARD BUT)--to show who is responsible for the cable sabotage. As expected, Gilger uses his cruiser to block the scan, enabling Fergus to contact the ship's computer to get the coded message he needs to decipher in order to gain control of the hijacked ship. But true to what Fergus himself says later in the book, "... my plans tend to be ridiculous and go wildly wrong and weird in unanticipated ways," Gilger reacts by launching a coup attempt that plunges the region into civil war.

Now Fergus and Mari have to stay alive long enough to figure out the list of seven terms sent by the computer, rescue Harcourt's daughter (who has been kidnapped to force Harcourt to stay neutral in the civil war), and deal with the Asiig, a mysterious race of scary aliens that occasionally capture humans who either disappear forever or return strangely altered.

Although Finder is a debut novel, it reads like the work of an experienced novelist. There is a confident tone and a sense that the author is having fun writing the book. If there is a weakness it lies in the characterization of the minor characters. The two major characters, Fergus and Mari, are well-developed. Fergus has a high level of self-confidence in his abilities but self-doubt about his motives and morals. Mari is a trouble seeker who is too smart to stay down on the farm but has a secret tying her (and the other Ms) to it. Also, it is nice to see a man and woman working together without any romantic or sexual relationship even being raised. But most of the other characters are not given a chance to live beyond what is needed for the plot. The best of the minor characters, Mother Vahn, provides key expository information and then dies in the first chapter. I did like Harcourt, who proves to be a wheeling-dealing bargainer.

Hand Finder to anyone who exclaims, "They don't write them like they used to write." This is an action-packed novel that does not slow down; it would make a great movie. There is enough humor to season the action without being overwhelming. The story is complete in one book, although there is certainly room for further adventures. And yet, despite this being an extremely well-done caper novel, I could not help wishing the author had challenged herself more and written something deeper.

Hmm. I'm sad I didn't connect to this one like other reviewers seem to have connected with it.

Fergus Ferguson is a bit of an Indiana Jones type character, but he's having his action adventure in space. Fergus is a repo man, and he's on a mission to steal back a spaceship.

I think my issue lies in how action heavy Finder turned out to be. I love action, but this book was pretty full throttle the whole way through. When I started Finder, I thought "Yes! This is going to be so much fun!", but the level of fun kept going and the character-action scale tipped too far down on the action for me.

If you love nonstop action, though, without getting to know who you are rooting for, this might be a really great pick for you.

This is the sort of adventure novel that could have been published at any point in the last seventy years (except the prose is much better than the vast majority of the old stuff). This is exactly the sort of novel that certain elements in fandom claim to want to read. Yet my grasp of the cosmic all leads me to believe that they will overlook this book.

Generally, sci-fi isn’t one of the genres I read. I do, however, pick one up once in a while if the book sounds good, or it’s written by an author I’m already familiar with. This book, which I picked up because it sounded interesting, is a good find. I really liked the main character Fergus after getting into the book because he’s very interesting and different. I also liked most of the side characters, as well. I really do like books with adventure and action, and this book had loads of both. And, fun. After a little bit of a rough start in the beginning, I was engrossed until the end with this unique space adventure. And, no, it isn’t so tech heavy you won’t enjoy it if you’re not big on sci-fi. This book wasn’t really what I was expecting in a good way, and I’m glad I picked it up. I do recommend this book and was provided a complimentary copy which I voluntarily reviewed.

3/5 Stars
Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for the e-galley.

I loved how this book dived right into the action at first but I never really became fully interested in the characters or story. It felt a bit disjointed and confusing to me for the first 30% of the book. The plot was definitely interesting and I liked it. I loved all the action but because I didn't really attach myself to the characters I had a hard time with it. Would recommend others to try!

One advantage of being an accomplished short story writer is knowing how to get the ball rolling. It doesn’t take Suzanne Palmer long to ingratiate readers to Fergus Ferguson, the hero of her debut novel Finder: he has an appreciation for ironic self-deprecation and for little old ladies who can survive out in “The Gap”, a sparsely populated region of space near the outskirts of the galaxy. Being nice to old ladies may be a cheap ploy for sympathy by the author, but it works, and it’s undeniably efficient. No sooner are Fergus’ profession (a kind of interstellar repo man called a “finder”) and goal (to retrieve a stolen ship called Venetia’s Sword) and prospective enemy (small-pond robber-baron Arum Gilger, who stole the ship) established through his salty banter with tough-as-nails native Mattie “Mother” Vahn, than a escalating sequence of obstacles come cascading down in front of Fergus, and the novel picks up the breathless pace it sustains through the end. This narrative formula serves Palmer’s celebrated shorter works well, as her Hugo-winning novelette “The Secret Lives of Bots” can attest. Palmer’s writing doesn’t sacrifice subtlety or nuance, she just knows how to use such tools without disrupting the tempo. The pace she sustains in Finder mostly benefits it, and it’s so entertaining that the ways it falls short are easy to forgive.
Fergus is a Scotsman, Earth-born but allied to the generations of Martian émigrés living under harsh earther occupation. He’d rather avoid bringing up his past: people know him as a hero of the Mars resistance even as far out as anarchic Cernee, a rock ruled by a loose confederation of chieftains and the loyalists in their employ. He doesn’t see himself the way others do, but he has a penchant for executing outrageous schemes to achieve his ends. The heist he must pull off to retrieve Venetia’s Sword is akin to jacking a smart car with a keyless entry, though getting past the ruthless Gilger and his enforcer Borr Graf prove to be the most harrowing part of his task: Gilger has chosen the day of Fergus’ arrival to make a play for total domination of Cernee. Now Fergus and his allies—Mother Vahn’s family of identical offspring who swear they’re not clones and Gilger’s longtime rival Harcourt—find their plan to put the squeeze on Gilger turned into a brutal fight for survival. Further complicating matters are the Asiig, a mysterious and terrifying alien race who mostly carry out ominous flybys over Cernee in their black triangle-shaped ships, abducting random citizens then returning them days later in, shall we say, a different state from how they found them. And the Asiig have taken an interest in Fergus and the conflict on Cernee.
It would be an understatement to say Palmer has a gift for piling on the plot factors. That she can sustain such an approach over the course of a story that is something like a dozen-fold longer than the stories she usually writes is impressive. She takes a block-by-block approach to building her world and her characters’ back stories, distributing little bits of context clues and expository statements to brace up the larger context. This combination of depth and efficiency elevates Finder above the rabble of space operas that crowd the current SF marketplace.
The story stretches out like a rubber band from Cernee back to Sol System and Mars, then snaps back to Cernee for the grand finale. This is the only element of the novel that didn’t sit well with me. I understand the author’s need to reconnect Fergus emotionally with his past on Mars, and while the reason she contrives to get him there is integrated into the plot early on it still came across as forced. There was perhaps also a sensible desire to liberate the action from the confines of a single location. I felt that the mcguffin Palmer uses to lure him back to his roots isn’t developed well enough beyond its functional purpose and is a non-factor once Palmer returns us to the main storyline.
None of that changes the fact that Finder is a thrilling space adventure from an expert hand who loves the art of genre storytelling. There is so much happening with this setting and so much potential for growing it even more. It's also a welcome slice of madcap fun, full of rich, fully realized characters and delightful far future odds and ends.

If you've ever been to Disneyland and ridden the original Star Wars ride (the one that seats you in a kind of cable car, and you begin floating along, then suddenly it jerks and takes a wild turn, begins to fall . . .) well, you'd have my visual image of this book.

It starts out so pleasantly, as Fergus Ferguson, a big red-head, rides a cable car with an elderly woman who is carrying a bunch of crates of lichen to sell.

A jerk, and things rapidly begin going wrong, setting off a wild adventure that keeps on accelerating until the very end.

I loved this book. I adored Fergus, whose inventiveness just about matches his ability to get himself into trouble. I loved the people of Cernee, especially prickly Mari , Good-hearted, sardonic Bale, and a host of other characters. The villains you love to hate, the action is so vivid it's cinematic, and the humor frequently had me chuckling, yet it didn't diminish the rising tension.

I loved this story, loved Fergus, loved Cernee--and loved the intriguing aliens, especially the Asiig. I really hope that Palmer intends to write more about them all.

Thank you to the publisher for the copy.

0-25% : Getting into the story. Finding out the quest.

25-50% : Reaching toward that goal! Yay having fun and really into the story !

50-75% : Deviating from the course, going someplace else, action action action... Okay, but am I supposed to care ? Why are we here ?

75-100% : Back on the main course, really interesting ! Much politics Yay... But part 3 kinda ruined it after all. Ugh too bad.

My critic as far as the writing goes is that this book was too focused on the action, so we didn't get any character's development (stayed 2 dimensional and didn't get attached at all). It also didn't explain.. Anything ? The politics were good, but then, 75% of the book was based on Cernee, so... What does it looks like? We're given fragment of informations when pertinent but never a bigger picture to let us grasp the scale of things. This leaves us sometimes confused and not able to really understand (therefore to care). I think this could have been a really great book with better editing (mostly clarifying things here and there and giving more character depts).

This was a really fun novel that I'll be sure to recommend at work to patrons, for all that it wasn't in my taste. It's a lot of fast paced and witty novel that will delight fans of sci-fi adventure space operas.

Every time I thought the story had ended, something else happened to poor Fergus. I loved this character. Everyone''s perfect anti-hero.

"From Hugo Award-winning debut author Suzanne Palmer comes an action-packed sci-fi caper starring Fergus Ferguson, interstellar repo man and professional finder.

Fergus Ferguson has been called a lot of names: thief, con artist, repo man. He prefers the term finder.

His latest job should be simple. Find the spacecraft Venetia's Sword and steal it back from Arum Gilger, ex-nobleman turned power-hungry trade boss. He’ll slip in, decode the ship’s compromised AI security, and get out of town, Sword in hand.

Fergus locates both Gilger and the ship in the farthest corner of human-inhabited space, a backwater deep space colony called Cernee. But Fergus’ arrival at the colony is anything but simple. A cable car explosion launches Cernee into civil war, and Fergus must ally with Gilger’s enemies to navigate a field of space mines and a small army of hostile mercenaries. What was supposed to be a routine job evolves into negotiating a power struggle between factions. Even worse, Fergus has become increasingly - and inconveniently - invested in the lives of the locals.

It doesn’t help that a dangerous alien species Fergus thought mythical prove unsettlingly real, and their ominous triangle ships keep following him around.

Foolhardy. Eccentric. Reckless. Whatever he’s called, Fergus will need all the help he can get to take back the Sword and maybe save Cernee from destruction in the process."

Because every once in awhile you need a good space caper to remind you space opera is awesome.

I didn't quite finish this in time, but I really enjoyed this space caper/adventure. Looking forward to the release date so I can find out what happens!

Looking for a swashbuckling hero who is part daredevil and part rogue with his own brand of charm? Meet Fergus Ferguson, now on a mission to recover (read that steal back) a certain spacecraft on a remote space settlement. Hang on tight as Suzanne Palmer blasts us of into a space opera adventure that plays out at the speed of light!

FINDER is fast, fun and furious as Fergus attempts to con the conman and retrieve the ship while escaping with his life. All in a day’s work for Fergus, but can he outwit the hostile mercenaries that will be on his tail?

Haven’t tried a space opera yet? Now’s the time to meet Fergus and friends…and enemies. An out of this world escape into reading!

I received a complimentary ARC edition from DAW!

Publisher: DAW
Publication Date: April 2, 2019
Genre: Sci-fi | Space Opera
Print Length: 397 pages
Available from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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A fun, quick and quirky space opera, "Finder" by Hugo Award-winner Suzanne Palmer channels both Douglas Adams and Orson Scott Card and fans of both will find much to love in this common (repo) man turned reluctant interstellar adventurer/potential galaxy savior. While the initial pulse is a stretch (again, back to Douglas Adams, or, perhaps World War I), the play pans out in a fast-moving story that sometimes works too hard and overrides character development. But, that's why we read space adventures in the first place, right? Not Palmer's best, but that's in relation to a best that is on a stellar level. A notable and significant addition to the sci-fi space canon.

Finder was not my typical read but I found myself captivated by this imaginative space adventure.

Fergus Ferguson is tasked with retrieving a sentient space craft that was stolen from its creators and he finds himself thrust into a space war that only a mastermind could possibly survive.

Lets just say nothing goes as planned by Fergus finds some amazingly loyal companions and some major life lessons along the way.

Like I said earlier, the plot was nothing like I expected but I really enjoyed Palmer's storytelling. I found myself anxiously looking for more clues as we route for Fergus and his friends that he makes along the way.

I received this ARC copy of FINDER from Berkley Publishing Group - DAW. This is my honest and voluntary review. FINDER is set for publication Apr. 2, 2019.

My Rating: 4 stars
Written by: Suzanne Palmer
Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: DAW
Publication Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN-10: 0756415101
ISBN-13: 978-0756415105
Genre: Scifi

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Finder-Suzanne...
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/find...
Itunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/find...
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Finder is a snappy, smart space adventure from Suzanne Palmer. It’s a lot of fun, and has some clever big ideas lurking beneath some tremendously human characters and a breakneck plot.

The story is centred on the marvellously alliterative Fergus Ferguson. Fergus calls himself a finder. He retrieves things for people. That leans less toward dropped earrings, and more toward slightly larger things – in this case, a spacecraft. To retrieve these lost objects, Fergus employs a variety of soft skills, including fast talking, impersonation, building improvised tools and the occasional well-placed theft. Fergus is also thoughtful, introspective, and altohihg unwilling to dig too far into his own psyche, gives us some truly vivid imagery to allow for a partial analysis of his personality.
The larger point here is, Fergus is fun to read. He can talk his way out fo a lot of things, and seeing the excuses and rationales he runs up to get out of various scrapes is a delight. At the same time, when events call for the physical, he’s no slouch (if not a ninja). There’s enough high impact conflict here to sate anyone – but there’s also a lot of running away, or arranging events so as to fight again another day. This is a smart, thoughtful protagonist, unwilling to risk their hide unnecessarily. That Fergus is also always ready with some banter is a plus, and helps carry the story along. But Fergus has enough depth to make him more than an entertaining cipher. There’s a sense of history, of past hidden beneath a shroud of memory and long con’s gone wrong. The meat is there if you want to infer and dig into it, and if not – he’s an interesting person with a smart mouth and a degree of competence that makes the characterisation an absolute joy.

Fergus operates in a weird, complicated, fascinating world. It’s one which knows about non-human species, where some are better known as your neighbours, but others are a potentially lethal enigma. The system he’s working in is a string of habitats, linked together by a desire for atmosphere and commerce, at the edge of any space where anyone cares about law enforcement. It’s a pot on the boil, torn between several factions, none of whom particularly want to share power with the others. But they’re also part of a broader universe, a claustrophobic environment connected by hump oints to a larger, sprawling universe. And to Palmer’s credit, this universe feels alive. If the habitats are often cramped, claustrophobic and filled with dangerous flora and fauna, they’re also thriving, with a dynamic and invested population base. The politics, the environs, the details of life in this world feel believable. The wider scale also works for internal consistency. There’s grime and grudges and attitude, and they all feel real. This is a real, living, breathing world – it makes internal sense, and it will keep your attention even as Fergus leaps across it wreaking havoc.

Speaking of which – the plot is rather fun. It ramps up quickly, and although you’re grounded, there’s a sense of the unknown and unfamiliar throughout. We’re grounding ourselves alongside Fergus, and as he looks into alien ships, into political malfeasance, and as he works to talk his way into stealing a star cruiser, we empathise, we understand his pain, every step of the way. The conflicts though have depth and raw, hard edges, and a history which helps them to feel real The stakes are high, for sure, and the pacing never lets up – throwing you between witty repartee, gunfire and the potential end of the world between paragraphs.

This is a tightly written, compelling space opera. It has charm and grace, and will make you want to finish it very quickly, to see what happens next. It is, above all, a fun piece of sci-fi which will reward your attention – and so I recommend it.

I enjoyed the world-building in this book, the characters were interesting enough, despite the villains being a little one-note and predictably stupid. The pace of the book is pretty brisk, lots of action but also enough introspection to balance out the story.

In the year of our Lord 2017 (of unfond memory), I read these two stories about sweet little bots doing their best, and it launched me into a new state of being in which I read short fiction so much that I have had to commission a logo about it. The main one, admittedly, was "Fandom for Robots," but a very close second was Suzanne Palmer's very sweet "The Secret Life of Bots." So it was with great pleasure that I learned she has her debut novel out this year: Finder!

Fergus Ferguson is a finder, and he's been tasked with finding a sentient ship, the Venetia's Sword, and stealing it back from the crime boss Arum Gilger. Things go spectacularly awry. First he meets a woman called Mattie Vahn, and then she dies, and then he meets a zillion of her apparent clones, the crossest one of whom insists on following him around suspiciously while he's trying to accomplish his business. There are also some quite ominous aliens flying about the place in pointy triangle ships. Nobody is sure what they want. Probably nothing good.

Fans of madcap excursions, please congregate. I have got the book for you. Not only is Fergus banging all over the universe in this book, dashing from one planet to the next trying to get things under control; but he is also perpetually trying to triage the many many things he is forced to care about; including but not limited to:

a very cross maybe-clone who reminds him of someone he lost
so many different changes of clothes that it boggles the mind (some of which the previous inhabitants have peed in)
decoding seven passwords to gain access to a sentient starship
transportation logistics
pointy triangle alien ships that keep re-orientating to point directly at him
murder plague insects
regular, annoying insects
his better-off-forgotten past as a Martian war hero
an unnerving number of dead bodies
disarming a defensive perimeter using tennis balls and sex toys

All on very little food or sleep, and in increasingly parlous physical condition as various of his enemies catch up to him and thwack him with varyingly deadly weapons. So there you go; it's that kind of book. You would know best if that is the kind of book you would enjoy. I enjoyed it massively. As the above list has perhaps made clear, Finder contains a very high number of elements. In the hands of a less talented creator, the whole shebang could have devolved into chaos -- much like any of the ninety-six-thousand plans Fergus makes over the course of Finder (but especially the one with the sex toys). Instead, it bounds exuberantly forward like tennis balls with vibrators inside, and crackles like vibrating tennis balls being electrocuted by defensive measures set by a paranoid warlord.

I give Suzanne Palmer and her publisher permission to use that last sentence as a blurb for the paperback edition. Be blessed.

Note: I received an e-ARC of Finder from the publisher for review consideration. This has not influenced the contents of my review.

A new science fiction book from an author I had not read before which turned out to be a great read. Apparently Earth has done itself in so that most of mankind has moved out to other planets- or at least other manmade habitats. Mars seems to be the most viable planet in our solar system and it’s initial settlers have been pushed aside as the last inhabitants of Earth take over when they have to move. Fergus Ferguson is a young man who has many memories of his home in Scotland but they are not good ones as the seas rise and his mother falls into madness and his father gives up. At age 15 he moves to Mars and finds out that he is someone who can solve problems even when they are life threatening.
In this book he is a ‘Finder’ , basically someone who is repossessing items that have been stolen. The item is Venetia’s Sword, a smart ship run by an A.I. (Which really made me think of some of Anne McCaffery’s books). This ship was taken for a test drive and then stolen and is located at Cernee, a habitat a long way from our solar system. Ferguson is sure he can figure out how to get it back but along with breaking into a smart ship he also finds himself caught up in a civil war that the different groups in Cernee have decided to start. My one quibble is that Ferguson constantly sells himself short (perhaps because he does manage to do everything like a super hero) which gets tiring after awhile. All in all it was a fun read.

I'm not really a science fiction reader, but this book had me from the very beginning. Fergus Ferguson is a 'finder'. He recovers stolen goods and returns them to their rightful owners. He is currently on the trail of a stolen space ship that, literally, can think for itself if you know the answers to the questions it will ask. Fergus knows the answers, or at least he believes that he does, but first he has to get close enough to the ship to 'talk' to it. This task is made more difficult when he ends up in the middle of a war...a war in which this stolen ship plays an important part. This story was a roller coaster of a ride and I enjoyed the trip very much. Was the ending designed so that there could be more books set in this universe? I hope so!