The Scavenger Door
The Finder Chronicles, Book 3
Suzanne Palmer
DAW
Fiction, Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Since running away from home at fifteen, Scotsman Fergus Ferguson has traveled to numerous worlds, met a wide variety of aliens, endured a number of escapes, and found all manner of missing items for various clients, but the one thing he never counted on finding was a kid sister he never even knew he had. On his trip back to Earth to tie up loose ends, Fergus learns about Isla, now a teen not much older than he was when he fled Earth - a teen who has grown up practically idolizing her brother's adventurous lifestyle, so different from the future envisioned for her by relatives. Maybe if he sticks around Scotland this time and spends some time with her, he can discourage her from making the same mistakes that led him to his risky existence (and to numerous scars, not to mention the peculiar "gift" by even more peculiar aliens that gives him unusual energy abilities)... but once a finder, always a finder.
He was just supposed to be finding some lost sheep, a favor more than a proper job, when he stumbles upon an unusual metal fragment - a fragment that seems oddly active to his energy sense. All of the sudden, a lot of people are very, very interested in him, the kind of people who skulk in surveillance vans and kick down doors to get what they're after. On the run with Isla (who of course won't be left behind), Fergus must reach out to friends old and new as he struggles to grasp just what he's stumbled into and how he's going to get out of it with his increasingly-patchwork skin in tact... and, oh, yeah, without that little bit of metal driving him insane and potentially destroying the solar system, not necessarily in that order.
REVIEW: The third installment of the Finder Chronicles maintains the active pacing and adventurous, occasionally humorous tone of the previous books, presenting another seat-of-the-pants life-and-death outing for Fergus that once again sees him at just the right place and time (or wrong place and time) to save or endanger entire worlds. It builds on events from the first two books, with several cameos and callbacks, even as Fergus himself is growing and changing through his adventures. The discovery of a sister feels a bit like a chance to leave some sort of a legacy, as well as a chance for a secondhand do-over - if he can convince Isla to stick to her university studies and stay planetside, at least. But, naturally, a young girl already chafing at stagnant life in a small Scottish town - one related to Fergus, no less - isn't going to be satisfied with a safe and comfortable little life, not when there's an entire galaxy out there to see and aliens to meet and adventures to be had... and not when the stakes are the survival of Earth at least and the rest of the solar system at most. She manages to not be deadweight, though she does have a lot to learn about the world beyond the Scottish pub where she's been raised, and what being a finder/freelance adventurer truly entails beyond the daydreams of a lonely girl. It's a messy, dirty, often bloody business that skirts the gray areas of legality (when it doesn't outright jump into the shadows), which sounds a lot more fun than it truly is when there are professionals with guns hot on one's heels. By the time the truth gets through to Isla, though, she's in too deep to get out... and she already recognizes that there are bigger issues at foot than whether she's having fun. Fergus, meanwhile, becomes increasingly convinced that he can't keep this lifestyle up forever if he wants to live a natural lifespan, even though finding things (and solving life-and-death problems by the seat of his exosuit) is so much a part of him he doesn't even know what he'd do without it. That may be little more than a philosophical question, though, if he can't figure out the alien metal fragments, who wants them so desperately, and how to stop them from reassembling themselves into Something Very Bad... a problem made more complicated by his alien "gift" that interacts in a most disturbing manner with the dangerous artifacts. Problems and enemies keep ratcheting up, building to an intense and somewhat emotional climax - and then on to an ending that's close to a cliffhanger. Honestly, it almost shaved a bit off the rating, to be left in that manner, but the rest of the story kept it afloat at the same level as the previous Finder books, so I gave it the same rating, on the (hopefully not naive) theory that there will, indeed, be a fourth installment and proper closure if/when the series comes to an end.
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