Coming Home by Jack McDevitt

 McDevitt has a talent for taking two seemingly unrelated plot lines...and keeping them unrelated. Chase and Alex are contacted by the heir of a former archaeologist to assess and possibly arrange the sale of an artifact her relative left on a closet shelf which dates to the Golden Age of space exploration, and which possibly provides a link to the whereabouts of the long lost contents of the Huntsville Space Museum.

At the same time, Chase and Alex are involved with the people who are trying to find a way to rescue the crew and passengers of a space liner stuck in a space warp, which only surfaces into real time once every five years.

Both tales are deftly interwoven without ever affecting the other, a quality rare in today's fiction, you know.

Other than that, and a somewhat surprising ending to the treasure hunter's tale it seems a rather lackluster performance from McDevitt. He's always a good writer, but it was a push to finish.

Firebird by Jack McDevitt

Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath are back in another adventure, with a challenging mystery at its heart. The sister of the widow of a somewhat famous physicist, Chris Robin, shows up with a trove of Robin's possessions that she wishes Benedict to market for her. As Alex is well aware of the value of "buzz" in generating handsome returns for artifacts, antiques and memorabilia, he sets out to find out as much as he can about Robin's disappearance, and arranges to be interviewed in the media about the man's odd disappearance.

Robin had been investigating ghost ship sightings and starship disappearances for some time before he, himself, went missing. In fact, the night of his disappearance, he and his pilot friend, Cermak, had just returned from space, where they had been performing the fourth in a series of experiments with dilapidated space yachts, trying to recreate the conditions whereby the craft would disappear from normal space time and re-appear periodically.

An interesting side plot develops after Chase and Alex visit the planet of Villanueva, which was the site of a horrible disaster thousands of years before when the planet entered a dust cloud and most of its population perished, leaving behind only its AIs to run things. Some of the AIs have gone insane and are hostile to human beings now, attacking anyone who lands on the planet. But the duo discover an AI, who calls himself Charlie, that is not hostile - he only wants to escape his millenial prison - and spirit him away with them.

Charlie tells them that there are other AIs, or Betas, still left on the planet that are also not insanely hostile, and enlists them in his crusade, quickly conceived, to recruit humans to rescue the Betas from Villanueva. Alex takes this show on the road, too, and there's some interesting philosophical and societal debate about what makes a being "human", possessing a "soul" and deserving of rescue.

The rescue theme continues through the end of the book when Alex figures out what happened when Chris Robin disappeared, and mounts a mission to find his ship, the Firebird, when it enters our universe for a brief sojourn. McDevitt poses some good questions about what a life is really worth, in terms of financial, societal, and political costs. I'm really enjoying these little scifi-cloaked mysteries.

Echo by Jack McDevitt

Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath, his trusty pilot and sidekick, are back in a new adventure...of sorts. The duo is contacted by a woman who wants to get rid of a gravestone-shaped artifact that's been kicking around as a lawn ornament for years, and which bears mysterious glyphs. When they go to her estate to pick it up, someone else has already been there and made off with the object. Alex and Chase start tracking down the people who have taken it, and also dig into the origins of the tablet.

It turns out to have belonged to a famous but disappointed fellow, long dead, Somerset Tuttle who spent his life searching for extraterrestrials other than the Mutes. Why anyone would suddenly develop an interest in the hunk of rock is the heart of the mystery. Chase and Alex discover that the "abductor" was a friend of the Tuttle's, Rachel, who used to work as a pilot for a sightseeing company, but who has since quit her job and devoted her life to helping orphaned children.

Unfortunately, the story drags on and on, slowly plodding its way to the final solution, which wasn't all that surprising, given that the clues are all there early in the book. One could optimistically say that all of the extraneous material was there in order to flesh out various characters and background in the Benedict universe, but I think McDevitt had a short story to tell, and used a novel to tell it. Not his best work, in my opinion.