I just finished reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Buried Deep, another in her Retrieval Artist series and I must say, it was most splendid. (Could you ask for better summer escapist reading?) There's always a mystery and a bit of a police procedural aspect to these books (although the police part is less and less as the series goes on and really only applies to the murders), but mostly it is all about dealing with different species and customs and traditions and how we all get along. What I really love about what Rusch has done with this series is that she refuses to follow either one of the more accepted first contact precepts: either the aliens want to help us (ala Vulcans in the Star Trek series) or they hate and want to kill us (Starship Troopers, Independence Day, Aliens, etc.) But what if this whole diplomacy "getting along in a Federation kind of way" is really hard - what if the aliens have customs that are so utterly and completely different from ours that there is no real way to accept them (or refute them as doing so means not getting along). What if we just have to swallow some very major weirdness for the sake of politics and alliances - to the point of bloody nastiness? That's what is going on in Rusch's world (which mostly takes place on the Moon but this go-round is also on Mars). In Buried Deep, we have aliens freaking out over a dead body, humans trying to get them to calm down and not really understanding the freak out and, well, chaos ensues.

Oh - and there is more than one murder mystery to solve - lots more this time.

As much as I enjoy the characters and setting and fast-paced smart plotting, it is those many moments of interaction between human and alien that really make this series zing for me. I also like how she throws in so many aspects of our modern society that haven't changed (in this case an over zealous reporter wreaks havoc in the most typic cable tv kind of way). I can't imagine better pure brain candy then the Retrieval Artist series (and also the new David Brin YA SF novel - Sky Horizon which is about a bunch of high school kids finding an alien in the desert and then trying to charge money for anyone to see him - his friends are not so impressed by humanity after that as you can imagine!) (More on Brin's book - which I very much enjoyed - during the Summer Blog Blast Tour the week of June 17th, when I interview him.)

The Retrieval Artist series is also a great series for SF loving teens - I'm going to have to fit into a column at some point as something they should all be reading; it's really pitch perfect and will make you think which, when it is done right, is why I love this genre so very much.