I totally fell off the wagon with these.  I have been reading, just...keep missing Wednesday somehow.  (I had to think really hard about whether it was Wednesday again).  Also I've been reading a lot of books that I just wasn't excited about (and some I DNFed or kind of wish I'd DNFed.)  But I am brought back by the need to talk about this awesome book I read:

Finder by Suzanne Palmer

Palmer also wrote The Secret Life of Bots, which I loved. This Finder series I originally passed over because I thought "a space repo man named Fergus Ferguson tries to steal back a spaceship in an old mining colony made of hollowed-out asteroids and various large tin cans" was going to be more absurd than I usually enjoy. Oh boy, I could NOT have been more wrong. 5-star book, A+ characterization and wonderful worldbuilding, totally.

The more I thought about what was working in this book, the more I was really, really impressed with how (despite Fergus' terrible name) this book took its characters so seriously.  Like...ALL the characters, from Fergus to the side characters to random folks Fergus met for a page or less.  Everyone had understandable goals and motivations which changed realistically as the plot unfolded and they reacted to events as much as Fergus did.  This led to very wonderfully ALIVE-feeling settings.  The asteroid colony and Mars both felt filled with peoples' hopes and dreams and tragedies.  Somehow this author made the politics of this collection of asteroids and tin cans feel messy and realistic and interesting.

I was also super impressed by how this author dealt with the really rather high amount of randomness in the plot.  Fergus is a thief.  He's doing a heist, scheming some schemes, and things go ass-up fairly early on.  He's realistically forced many, many times to make a bad plan, just because it'll make SOMETHING change and then he can reassess.  This could very easily have felt capricious and slapstick and unearned (a pet peeve of mine in some books), but it did NOT, because of the wonderful CHARACTERIZATION.  Fergus spent the whole book understandably stressed about everything, convinced that he was going to get himself and everyone he cared about killed.  He felt the GRAVITY of all this unplanned chaos, and passed that tension on to the reader, while moving forward anyway in the smartest way he could come up with (and he is SMART!  It's a whole plot point that he several times amazes people with his knowledge because the first thing he does is READ THE ENTIRETY OF THE ASTEROID INTERNET so he knows what's what.  A protagonist!  Actually looking shit up rather than winging it!  <3 <3!)  Yes, he was lucky, and yes, he had some help from many quarters, but it somehow all made sense and held together without feeling random.

Also, the science felt like it held.  There was a lot of dealing with zero- and low-G and crawling around on the outside of asteroids and habitats, and it felt realistic without being overwhelming.  Which was just icing on the great characterization and smart-plot cake.  

Also there was no extraneous romance, which is also a plus for me. 

I immediately needed to track down everything in this series, after reading this.

A++, do recommend.