Finder

It'd be the easiest thing in the world to just call this "MacGuyver but in space" (and you'd be mostly right to do so!), but that leaves out the sheer, improbable luck this protagonist experiences that really tested my suspension of disbelief.

I don't want to use the term "Mary Sue" too flippantly, but our main character, Fergus Ferguson (yes, that's his real name and yes, other characters have the same knee-jerk reaction I did upon hearing it), is a little too neat of a package for me. Even now having finished the book I struggle to think of a major character flaw beyond, "survivor's guilt, sorta kinda?" He's clearly meant to be likeable, but when you're so much of a nice guy out of the gate and you're pretty much the same at the end of the story, why am I as a reader compelled to follow you?

I'll mostly remember this book for the fact that damn near every other scene ended with Fergus either going to sleep or getting his ass kicked and blacking out - which happened frequently enough to notice before the midpoint of the book - and the fact that he eavesdropped on about six or seven different plot-relevant conversations. There's a lot of right place/right time going on here, and it never really felt like he was at risk of a meaningful failure or setback. The stakes felt too low for me.

That said, the worldbuilding was done well, and I appreciated the attention to detail vis-a-vis space station life and zero-gravity interactions. The station politics and factions were almost more interesting to me than the outsider who came and screwed up everyone's backroom machinations. And there's plenty of dramatic action and momentum pulling you from scene to scene. So it wasn't all bad, but I was looking for something a little more engaging than this.