Today as part of my guest post series where authors talk about books they love, I’ve got Chris Gerrib here to talk about Suzanne Palmer’s The Finder Chronicles, which I have to admit, I haven’t read. But now I want to.

Chris is also here to promote his book ONE OF OUR SPACESHIPS IS MISSING. This is Chris Gerrib’s fourth novel.  He is also author of The Mars Run, Pirates of Mars and The Night Watch which constitutes his Pirates Trilogy.

The title is a bit of a mouthful, but the story looks great. Here’s a bit about it:

In the 23rd century, spaceships just don’t go missing.

FBI agent Ray Volk is assigned to a task force to investigate a tragic accident: the disappearance of interplanetary passenger liner ValuTrip Cardinal, carrying 500 souls between Mars and Earth on a routine run. What looks like a cut-and-dried case of pressure loss is complicated by the arrival of a Martian Captain. A very cute Martian Captain who keeps sticking his nose in Ray’s investigation.

Martian exchange student Kelly Rack knows the disappearance is no accident. She survived the ships’ hijacking, but learns the former cruise entertainer leading the pirates has plans for the passengers, and they don’t include sightseeing. Kelly has avoided the murderous pirates, except now an off-duty Earth Commander insists on organizing resistance for the passengers. She forces Kelly to climb through service tunnels on sabotage runs, risking capture and death.

Can Ray shake down the right accomplices to capture the good ship ValuTrip Cardinal before its new captain spaces everyone on board? Will Kelly discover the pirates’ hidden plans for their prisoners? The race is on, because One of Our Spaceships is Missing!

Here’s Chris to talk about Suzanne Palmer’s books:

They say opposites attract.  In my latest work, the military plays an active role.  In the Pirates Trilogy, the whole point of the story is the why and how of creating a space fleet.  The series I’d like to talk about today, Suzanne Palmer’s The Finder Chronicles, has very little military or government involvement.  When they do get involved it is not necessarily a good thing.

That’s one kind of opposite.  The other kind of opposite is process.

There are two kinds of writers in the world, pantsers and plotters.  Pantsers, more formally known as “discovery writers,” well, discover what happens in their story as they write.  Plotters, more formally known as outliners, have an outline that they follow.  I am a pantser and I strongly suspect that Suzanne Palmer is a plotter. 

Now, pantsers can commit trilogy (see above) but when a plotter does a trilogy, it can be a thing of beauty.  A thing like Palmer’s The Finder Chronicles. 

The books are set in a far-future time.  Humans have muddled through climate change, which sucked, but we made it.  We also made it to the stars, where we’re still muddling around.   There are aliens (some really alien) but there’s no Federation.  Humans aren’t at the top of the heap but neither are we at the bottom.  (This is another opposite – my books have no aliens – or at least not yet.)

Book One, Finder, opens with Fergus Ferguson, a red-haired Scotsman who left Earth for good at age fifteen, arriving at the end of human-controlled space.  He’s there to repossess a spacecraft, the Venetia’s Sword.  It was made by his friends and employers back on Pluto and sold to one Arum Gilger, who decided to stop paying.

Okay, cool – heist in space.  Except the world Palmer has created here is outstanding.  The Sword is at Cernee, which is a collection of orbiting habitats linked to each other by cables.  You get from hab to hab via cable car.  Fergus is on one of those cars when an attack dumps him in the middle of a civil war.  And by the way, there’s a bunch of powerful aliens flying around the area in unstoppable triangular ships.

Book Two, Driving the Deep, gets cooler.  Fergus, now with a piece of alien something inside of him, is persuaded to go back to Earth.  He goes back to patch things up except he finds himself in the middle of an art theft.  Then his friends on Pluto get attacked, and the trail to find them leads to Saturn’s moon Enceladus.  Book Three, The Scavenger Door, ties all the pieces together nicely.  It turns out that the aliens he dealt with in Book One had a plan for him.  This plan might get him and his newly-discovered sister dead.

So why do I like this series so much?  Well, clearly I found the worldbuilding outstanding.  It’s well-thought-out and it just makes sense.  It’s also not either Star Trek perfect or Star Wars bad. (Who really wants to be a moisture farmer on Tatooine anyway?)  This “muddling through” and messy middle has informed my latest book.  In Palmer’s world and mine, things are neither perfect nor disastrous, and there’s a lot of people just doing the best that they can.

Although each book is a complete story with a beginning, a middle and an end (sometimes we don’t get that in a series) we also have a complete three-book arc. Fergus goes from emotionally shut-down man to an open person while what looked like Alien Threat-of-the-Week aliens turn out to be key players with a long-term plan.  I have to say that having each book be a complete story is an advantage of a pantser.  Since we don’t have a grand plan, we have to actually finish each book.

I also like Fergus’ moral code.  There’s a very low body count in this series, largely because Fergus takes great efforts to not hurt people.  He finds things, but only in order to return them to their rightful owner.  His one selfish theft, which happened when he was fifteen and stole a motorbike to run away from Earth, bothers him years later.  It’s mentioned in all three books and a key plot point in Book 2. 

So, I highly recommend Suzanne Palmer’s The Finder Chronicles and encourage you to find a copy for your collection.  It’s really an example of how to do a trilogy right.

A little more about Chris: Chris Gerrib admits to being a bit obsessed with Mars, but in a healthy way – all of his books so far have at least something about Mars in them.  Chris lives in the Chicago suburbs and still has a day job in IT.  He holds degrees in history and business from the University of Illinois and Southern Illinois University.  He also served in the US Navy during the First Gulf War, and can proudly report that not one Iraqi MiG bombed Jacksonville, Florida while he was in the service.  In his copious free time, Chris is a past President of and currently active in his local Rotary club.  His website is www.privatemarsrocket.net

Buy his book here