Fergus Ferguson, repo-man, has one job: find the spacecraft Venetia’s Sword and steal it back from Arum Gilger, ex-nobleman turned power-hungry trade boss. Finding Gilger in the farthest corner of human-inhabited space, a gas-giant harvesting colony called Cernee, was easy. The hard part will be getting past a field of space mines, hacking into the Sword‘s compromised AI, and fighting a crew of hostile enemies to take control of the ship. 

But when a cable car explosion launches Cernee into a civil war, Fergus finds himself caught in the crosshairs. Repossessing the Sword requires him to side with Gilger’s enemies, risk death, and get abducted by aliens. Fergus must learn to set aside his pride – and confront a past he’s been running from his whole life – in order to take back the Sword and simultaneously save Cernee from destruction.

‘Finder’ was an action-packed story following the calamitous attempts of Spaceship Repo Man and trouble magnet, Fergus Ferguson, to repossess a stolen ship. What should have been a simple, one-person, ‘Get close. Get the code. Get the ship. Get out,’ operation turned into a series of life-threatening events that included exploding cable cars, an alien abduction and a full-scale civil war that risks destroying a fragile collection of space habitats with Fergus.

The world-building takes a while at the beginning, but it was well-thought through and vividly evoked the hazards and thrills of living in a collection of tin cans in space, connected only by cables and where everyone takes for granted jetting from habitat to habitat with nothing but a spacesuit and a powered stick between them and the endless void. 

The plot is complicated without being chaotic. Fergus’ ability to survive the challenges he faced pushed my suspension of disbelief to its limits, but his tricks and schemes were fun to watch.

Fergus was brave, resourceful, often reckless and almost always dogged by regret over past failings.

The baddies were really bad, and the good guys were only a little better (equally lethal, but they meant well), 

The aliens were so alien, I still don’t know what their motivation was, but, like me, what they required of Fergus was summed up in a single sentence: “Be interesting”. He interested me enough that I’ve already bought the next book in the series. 

I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Joe Hempel. If there had been an ebook version of the book available, I’d have dumped the audiobook. Joe Hemple’s voice was so gentle and relaxed that it was mildly soporific. He frequently ended paragraphs with a tone of passive resignation better suited to a sad cleric officiating at a funeral than to a man involved in a series of life-or-death struggles. Thankfully, the second book has a different narrator.