Recovery Man

Kristine Kathryn Rusch 2007 Buy from Amazon.com

In all the previous Retrieval Artist novels Miles Flint has been haunted by the death of Emmeline, his baby daughter. Now while he is examining the files left by his mentor Paloma, he finds references to her and his ex-wife Rhonda Shindo. He researches to find out why a Retrieval Artist like Paloma would be interested in his family and begins to discover that there is a great deal he didn’t know about Rhonda.

Rhonda and her daughter Talia live on Callisto, a moon of Jupiter controlled by the Aleyd Corporation. Rhonda has worked for Aleyd for years, and was blamed for the death of hundreds of Gyonnese larvae in an experiment for Aleyd. The punishment was that her daughter would be taken by them. Talia doesn’t know this, and she also doesn’t know that she is a clone. Rhonda has hidden Emmeline and 5 other clones because she knows the Gyonnese won’t accept a clone as a real child. But Rhonda is kidnapped by a Recovery Man hired by the Gyonnese, they want her and they want her daughter.

This was an interesting concept, that Miles Flint was involved in a Disappearance long before he became a Retrieval Artist, before he even became a police officer. All these years later, he finds that he didn’t know his wife as well as he thought, and he has a daughter that he doesn’t know. Talia herself is still in danger, and even though she is only thirteen years old, she works hard to get herself out of danger and makes swift decisions about who to trust in a suddenly strange world.

The decisions made by Rhonda, and her motivations for each one, are touched upon but ultimately left as presumption. The scenes involving Rhonda only show her thoughts about the safety of her daughters, not the detail of the Disappearance itself. As she fights to free herself from Hadad Yu, the Recovery Man hired to kidnap her, she shows that she is intelligent, potentially dangerous and very human. The experiment that killed the Gyonnese larvae weighs on her mind, but not as much as the killing of another human.

Once again it felt that there wouldn’t be enough time to wrap up the various threads of the plot before the end of the novel but the all came together just in time. It does lead to questions about the future of Miles Flint and his career as a Retrieval Artist though, and I hope that this is not the end of these novels.

Buy from Amazon.com