Customer Reviews

Consequences: A Retrieval Artist Novel

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Rusch loves to write characters, both protagonists and antagonists, in shades of gray. And the reader, often used to choosing sides and rooting for or against characters always ends up, like her characters, with niggling doubts as to the choices they've made.

Consequences continues the tight suspense of the entire Retrieval Artist series by drawing us into the lives and motivations of complex, richly drawn characters, including Miles Flint, a good man forced to make dark choices, and DeRicci, a reluctant hero who believes in only one thing: that she will always fail.

This book, nay the entire RA series, belong in any serious sci-fi reader's collection.

Rusch's multi-racial galactic civilization is enthralling, and she also knows how to tell a compelling story. Flint, the Retrieval Artist who specializes in bringing people back from being Disappeared, is an interesting mix of noir private detective and high-tech hero, constantly weighing his actions in the moral scales, thinking through what he does. In this case, events spin out of his control rather quickly, and dire happenings are revealed. First I've seen of Rusch's work, but I'll soon be reading everything she's written.

In the far distant future, mankind has spread throughout the stars colonizing worlds and making treaties with alien species to trade goods. Part of each treaty includes a clause that when humans deal with aliens, they must obey alien laws and if they don't they will be punished according tothe penal code of those they have beleaguered. Many humans who break alien laws become the Disappeared, changing their identity and going to planets to escape alien justice.

Caleb and Mimi Lahiri go to Retrieval Artist Miles Flint to hire him to find their daughter Carolyn who has been pardoned by the new ruling government of Etae who were once considered rebels. It isn't long before he locates Carolyn and reunites her with her parents but soon afterward the police on Armstrong, the domed city on the moon, find all three Lahiris murdered. Mike's former partner officer Noelle DeRicci wants his help but he has to work alone due to the nature of his job. He learns that he is being set up for the Lahiris murders and must find a way of clearing his name by solving the case without getting himself killed.

Part science fiction, part mystery and pure enjoyment are the words to describe Kristine Kathryn Rusch's latest Retrieval Artist novel. What makes CONSEQUENCES stand out is that the Etae are humans although they are not part of the Earth Alliance because they are considered uncivilized warmongers who practice genocide on their own people. Though not enough attention is paid to the alien races except for a few very serio-comic scenes, this is a strong murder mystery in outer space story line

Harriet Klausner

Consequences (2004) is the third novel in the Retrieval Artist series, following Extremes. In the previous volume, Miles Flint discovered that a murder during the Armstrong Marathon was committed by a psychopathic Disappeared. When she fled the Moon, he chased her in Paloma's yacht and caught up while she was delayed in destroying a space cop ship. In the ensuing encounter, they shot each other, but Flint survived.

Meanwhile, Noelle DeRicci had also learned the real identity of the murderer and discovered the plot to release a deadly virus into the Armstrong Dome. She managed to quarantine the Marathon before the virus could spread to the Dome itself and thus saved thousands of lives.

In this novel, DeRicci has been promoted to Assistant Chief of Detectives and is assigned to a murder case with political implications. She discovers that Flint has a connection with the case and goes alone to talk with him. Flint refuses to discuss his professional relationships with the victims, but offers to work on the case as a detective for his usual fees. DeRicci declines this offer, due more to budget problems than otherwise.

After DeRicci departs, Flint remembers his efforts to retrieve Carolyn Lahiri for her parents after she has been pardoned. Unlike most Disappeared, she had been fleeing a human government. She and four other college students had joined the rebels in the civil wars on Etae, an alien world that had been invaded by other aliens for its resources and later settled by humans. Ten years before, the rebels had conquered the planet and established an unaligned human government. Now they are negotiating for inclusion into the Earth Alliance and the talks are being held in Armstrong.

While investigating Carolyn's parents, Flint had inserted taps into their security system. Using his backdoor, he viewed the crime scene and then checked the log files. Although most of the relevant logs had been scrambled, one redundant backup file shows the actual murder. The act had been committed by a hired assassin using killing enhancements not detectable by standard weapon scans.

In this story, Flint searches for the assassin, but DeRicci soon finds herself dealing with the political situation. Anatolya Dobryn, the Butcher of Etae, is the Etae representative to the negotiating session. The Earth Alliance diplomats are biased against admission of Etae into the alliance, so Armstrong has been chosen for the conference just to inconvenience the Etae delegation. However, this inconvenience turns into riots and deadly violence against the Etae party. Then a former Etaen settler escalates the violence to disaster level.

This story shows Dobryn as a talented propagandist who has only done what she considered to be necessary to achieve justice. It is surely no accident that her name invokes Balkan associations, for the Etae situation strongly resembles that of Bosnia. As the author points out, most governments were founded in violence -- as was the United States -- but the rebels later changed their image to that of peacemakers. How, then, should successful revolutionaries be judged, as butchers or heroes?

Highly recommended for Rusch fans and for anyone else who enjoys police procedurals with good characterization and unexpected plot twists. If anyone has not previously read this series, the initial volume is The Disappeared.

-Arthur W. Jordin

If you're not into hard SF, this might be the ticket for you. (I picked up the ebook version at another site.)

I've been trying to get more SF into my reading diet, and this series, so far, is really filling the bill. This combines two genres: SF and mystery.

Miles Flint, former Moon detective, is now a Retrieval Artist, someone who specializes in finding those who have Disappeared; the Disappeared are those who've gone into hiding usually because of committing crimes (sometimes unwittingly) against space aliens.

In this case, a judge and his wife, a doctor, hire Miles to find their daughter, who supported the rebels on an alien planet, even joining up with the rebels in their war. She's been pardoned, and so she is persuaded to go with Miles, who takes her back to her parents.

In a gruesome scene, all three are murdered. But by whom? And why?

Miles feels guilty, and decides to track down the killer or killers - on his own dime. We also get to meet up with Detective DeRicci again, who has become a minor celebrity of sorts, for her "heroism" in the prior novel...

I've become a major fangirl with this series, because it combines soft SF, mystery, and political intrique. Ms. Rusch has a deft hand at weaving all three strands into this tale, with twists and turns abounding in a fascinating - and believable - way.

Did I mention I'm a fangirl of this series? Yeah!!