Consequences: A Retrieval Artist Novel

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Book Overview

A woman dies in the domed city of Armstrong on the Moon. Detective Noelle DeRicci discovers that the victim is a Disappeared-an outlaw in hiding wanted for crimes against an alien civilization. Only... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0451459717
• ISBN13: 9780451459718
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Roc
• Length: 370 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 4.2" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

First-rate SciFi

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.

Shades and shades of gray

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.

Great sf mystery

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

A Story of the Tainted

Consequences in 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 Sta