Think the blackness of space is scary? Wait till you see the darkness in the ocean below the ice on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
Driving the Deep (Finder Chronicles #2)
by Suzanne Palmer
May 5th, 2020 DAW
Fergus Ferguson is a lost boy with a talent for finding things…no matter where in the galaxy they wind up. Granted, he’s not been a boy for quite a while, but his childhood traumas still haunt him — an abusive mother and a father that committed suicide in front of him — and that’s bound to leave a mark.
He ran away from Scotland when he was old enough to steal an older cousin’s motorcycle, and it’s been hanging over his head ever since. Though he’s built a career, and a reputation, as a sort of galactic repo man and troubleshooter, been captured and changed by aliens, and found a group of friends at the edge of the Solar System that he’d do anything for, it’s his past that he can’t get past.
So Fergus heads to Earth to return the bike he’s been paying for storage on for decades and to apologize to whoever’s left of his family for running off. Only when he gets there he’s in for a surprise, getting first caught up in an investigation for stolen artwork, and then discovering that his friends orbiting Pluto have been kidnapped.
With a very cranky and officially retired NYC cop in tow, Fergus heads back to Pluto to do what he does best, find his friends, assuming they’re still alive. There’s a trail, of sorts, and it leads him to Enceladus, an ocean covered moon of Saturn.
Fergus gets himself a job as a pilot for the transport company that services the icebound world, descending through boreholes in the ice to the perpetually dark sea beneath, where it’s all too easy to lose your mind, and where somewhere, someone is doing something that requires kidnapping the top minds in AI research. Someone more than willing to kill off anyone not useful.
Driving alone through the deep darkness is enough to drive anyone crazy after a while, there’s more than madness down here. Fortunately, Fergus has a number of talents beyond getting in and out of trouble. He’s also a pretty good guy, and though he can be unsettling when you meet him, which is almost always in unlikely circumstances, he tends to grow on people. Which is good, because he’s going to need friends if he’s going to save the ones that have gone missing.
This is the second book in the Finder series, and though it references things that have gone before you get the idea pretty quickly. Still, that doesn’t mean you can’t go start at the beginning with Finder (Apr 2019). Either way, this is a good read, a series worth keeping an eye on.
Originally posted May 1, 2020 on SFRevu.com: http://www.sfrevu.com/php/Review-id.php?id=18948