Driving the Deep (Suzanne Palmer)

Driving the Deep
The Finder Chronicles, Book 2
Suzanne Palmer
DAW
Fiction, Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Fergus Ferguson has a knack for finding stolen things - and finding trouble - wherever he goes across the galaxy, but there's one item he's been avoiding for far too long: the motorcycle he stole at age 15 when he ran away from his home in Scotland and fled to the stars. He keeps meaning to return it to his cousin and make amends, but can't seem to get up the courage to face the place that left him so heartbroken. Now, having more or less recovered from the almost-deadly excitement on the distant deep-space habitation of Cernee, he realizes he can't put it off anymore. He says goodbye to his friends, the eccentric Shipbuilders of Pluto, and makes the trek sunward to Earth and a dusty storage unit... only to find that the motorcycle is long gone, replaced by crates containing stolen art. The next thing he finds is a retired New York City police detective accusing him of the theft and associated murders - just when Fergus gets word that the Pluto shipyard has been attacked. With the detective as a determined yet distrustful stowaway, Fergus heads back to space, and plunges into a plot that takes him deep beneath the ice of Saturn's ocean moon Enceladus, where he might find his missing friends from the shipyard... if he doesn't find a grisly, watery grave first.

REVIEW: Like the first installment of Fergus Ferguson's adventures, Driving the Deep hearkens back to old-school space adventures, if with reasonably hard science behind it. It follows through on some themes from that book, too, as Fergus has come to realize that the galaxy just isn't big enough to keep running away from his painful past, not to mention dealing with the fallout of his peculiar alien encounter and its aftereffects. It brings back the AI (or rather SI - "simulated intelligence") ship Venetia's Sword, whose theft kicked off the previous adventure. The pursuit of the Pluto attackers to Enceladus holds a personal horror for Fergus; his father committed suicide by drowning right in front of the boy, a big part of why he ran away from home, so finding himself immersed beneath countless kilometers of crushing water is hardly a pleasant experience. Palmer creates an interesting and horror-tinged world beneath the moon's icy crust, one where the pressure of the deep alone is enough to drive many to madness even without dark conspiracies and killers and secret plots piling on the stress. As before, he finds allies and enemies in unexpected places, with an abundance of luck both good and ill, and after a fair bit of chaos and close calls, most everything wraps up by the last pages (save a few stray threads for the third installment to pick up on). Things slow down a bit while the technical challenges and culture of Enceladus are explained, but overall it's as fast-paced and adventurous as the previous volume, and just as well recommended.

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