Finder

From Hugo Award-winning author Suzanne Palmer comes a "wicked, fast-paced, and fun" science fiction thrill ride starring an interstellar repo man trying to pull off the heist of a lifetime (Elizabeth Bear). "The zippier, zanier side of space opera." -B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog 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.

Suzanne Palmer is an award-winning and acclaimed writer of science fiction. In 2018, she won a Hugo Award for Best Novelette for "The Secret Life of Bots". Her short fiction has won readers' awards for Asimov's, Analog, and Interzone magazines, and has been included in the Locus Recommended Reading List. Her work has also been features in numerous anthologies, and she has twice been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and once for the Eugie M. Foster Memorial Award. Palmer has a Fine Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where as a student she was president and head librarian of the UMass Science Fiction Society. She currently lives in western Massachusetts and is a Linux and database system administrator at Smith College. You can find her online at zanzjan.net and on Twitter at @zanzjan.