I'm a pretty big fan of Will Ferguson. His book, Beyond Belfast, which was about his attempt to find his grandfather's origin story, was one of the funniest things I ever read but also one of the most disturbing as he talked about the Troubles between the Protestants and Catholics. I read that book in 2009 and I vowed that I was going to visit Northern Ireland. Well, it took me 10 years but I did it. Hopefully when it is safe to travel again we'll go back.

However, this book is quite a bit different than Beyond Belfast. It's fiction for one thing and although there are a number of locales mentioned the ones given the most space are New Zealand and Japan. (The title character does have a connection to Northern Ireland though.) I do have to say that Ferguson's descriptive passages show his background as a travel writer because they made me long to visit those places he described. Check out this passage from p. 317 situated in outback Australia after a rare rain:
Flowers exuberant, and birds exultant. Babblers and budgies and many-colored parrots. Cockatoos, uncaged and elegantly crested, gold-flecked and regal, chattering away royally as they rooted about for seeds. Finches flitting in and out of the tussock grass and shrubs, drinking in the dawn. It was the first day of creation, when the world was sung into existence, when that first inhalation had yet to exhale, a breath suspended in amazement and joy.

Wow!

Okay, back to the usual plot summary. The Finder is just that. He finds objects that have been lost, things that the world thought were gone for good. Like Mohammad Ali's Olympic gold medal which Ali threw into a river after being the victim of a racist attack. Somehow The Finder found it. He gets paid handsomely for these items and he is quite ruthless in his pursuit of them. An INTERPOL agent, Gaddy Rhodes, has been hunting the finder and she thought she was about to get him on a tiny island in southern Japan. When she wouldn't accept that the body of a man found there, dead of an apparent suicide shot to his face, was the elusive Finder she was demoted to a desk job in New York City. The Finder next surfaces in Christchurch New Zealand just after the earthquake that hit that city in 2011. Travel writer Thomas Rafferty and photojournalist Tamsin Greene run across him in a hotel bar. Tamsin takes his picture but The Finder manages to steal her memory card. Thomas goes after him but when he sees a body crushed under a recently collapsed wall dressed just like him he assumes the man is dead. Thomas has a bigger agenda than doing travel pieces on New Zealand. He is looking for Rebecca, a woman who has something of his and he thinks she is in New Zealand. He goes tearing to the North Island after her but learns she has left for the Outback of Australia so he follows her there. Tamsin also goes to Australia not so much following Thomas as seeing what there is to see. She doesn't find Thomas but The Finder does because Thomas picked up a saint's medal in Christchurch that belongs to The Finder. The Finder agrees to find Rebecca and get Thomas' item from her and Thomas will then return his medal. It doesn't quite go according to plan but Thomas does get closure. There might even be a happy ending for Thomas and Tamsin. And The Finder? Well, he just keeps finding lost items in his ruthless way.

In the author's note Ferguson tells the reader that he has hidden "almost a dozen...references to the films of Alfred Hitchock" in the book. He tells us some of them but there are six for readers to find. I must confess I didn't find them. I'll be interested to see if the other members of my book club have found them. ( )

One of the blurbs I read for Ferguson's work said that the reviewer would love to get inside Ferguson's mind. It would be amazing!

The Finder is so different from anything else that Will has written, and yet just as quirky. I had so much fun peeling away the layers of the Finder. One of those books you want to start over again right away. ( )

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

I am not going to be able to finish this one. The prologue was mystifying, the first part very slow and almost travelogue-like in its meandering, and then the second part has defeated me. It purports to be recalling the narrator's childhood in Belfast, and includes lots of British vocabulary and habits (chips and mushy peas, tea with milk etc) but there are also references to row houses, pocketbooks, drywall, the practice of hiding Easter Eggs etc, and these grate on me and throw me out of the story. Perhaps they are clues to some later to be developed mystery, but I am not interested enough to continue and find out. ( )