Finders-Seekers

Ghatti's Tale #1

by Gayle Greeno

Their technological resources destroyed, a colonizing expedition from Earth has been stranded on the world of Methuen for over two hundred years. Their continued survival is largely due to the organization of healers known as the Eumedicos and to the Seekers Veritas, a unique group composed of pairs of Bondmates, one human and one ghatti—a telepathic catlike being native to Methuen who bonds with a specific human for life. These Bondmates travel from town to town, settling disputes by truth-reading the minds and emotions of plaintiffs and defendants. While most people respect the Seekers, there are those who fear the ghatti powers. And now someone has begun attacking Seeker pairs.

What no one knows is that this destroyer has targeted one specific pair of Bondmates as special victims—the woman Doyce and the ghatta Khar'pern. For the key to defeating this deadly foe is locked away in Doyce's mind behind barriers even her ghattas has never been able to break down.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Cats, Science Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, High Fantasy, Magic

506 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Barbara ★ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is basically a story of humans on an alien planet where telepathic cats bond with certain humans (ones with psychic abilities). These "Seeker-pairs" then travel the country (planet?) acting as truthseekers in civil or criminal disputes. The cat (Ghatt) reads the mind of the individual in question and telepathically tells the human whether the person is lying or not. Once a determination of truth or lie is made, the local judges determine punishment or whatever.

Suddenly someone is killing of Seeker pairs and mutilating the corpses. The first killed is Doyce's lover, Oriel. Doyce and Khar (her Ghatta) embark on a journey retracing Oriel's last quest in an effort to figure out who is doing this and why.

I liked the concept but I thought the story was drawn out (500+ pages is a lot when dealing with psychic cats.) All in all a good tale and I will be continuing the series as it will be interesting to see where the story goes next.

[Andr01d · Rating 1 out of 5]

This series has a great premise that is totally botched by the tedious, uninteresting writing style and uncompelling characters. Each book in the series is a few hundred pages too long, being bloated with endless prattle between unmemorable characters loftily exchanging endless paragraphs riddled with meaningless jargon pertaining to a poorly-rendered fantasy world one would rather not inhabit, from which the reader is expected to extract the somewhat gruesome and equally uninteresting plot. I thought I couldn't go wrong with a book about telepathic cats, but I have to say this book is definitely not the cat's pajamas.

[Rowan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wonderful premise - reminds me of Anne MacCaffrey's Dragonriders in many ways. The plot was a bit predictable, but the characters more than made up for it. Language a little too flowery for my tastes.

[Indigo Crow · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book first a couple years after its original publication. I recalled having very much liked it back in my teen years, so I decided I would pick it up and read it again to see if I've changed my mind about it.

As it turns out, I like it even better than I remember liking it when I first read it all those years ago.

The writing is good. I felt compelled to continue on. If I hadn't had other matters that needed my attention, I would rather spend my time moving on in the story. Sometimes the author gets a little too wordy, but for the most part, I felt like there was a good balance of description. And it takes off like a shot! Lots of books have slow starts, but this one gets down to business right away.

This book is somewhere in between fantasy and science fiction, but leans more to the side of science fiction. In that regard, though, there are some things that stand out as... odd. For example, the people of this world have been there for 200 years or so. I don't think mentioning this is a spoiler, really, because it says so right on the back cover and because you learn this very early into the book. What confuses me a bit about that is that there seems to be a rather vast population to this world. I'm not sure of how many humans there were to start this new population, but regardless, the amount of people and the progress made in that time seems overblown. There are a few other cultural things that seem to me like they evolved too quickly in the span of around 200 years, also. I can give the benefit of the doubt that things like horses and squirrels may have been aboard their ships when they arrived at the planet, and thus were released and procreated as they pleased in the new environment, but there are other issues that make me stop and sigh. For me, this sort of thing can be a distraction...

I found that I liked all the ghatti (the catlike creatures). Some of the human characters, not so much. Doyce's attitude can wear on one sometimes... And there are times at which she does not act her age. Even so, it's very refreshing to have a main character who is a real adult! She's 37 years old. You get a little bored of teenagers and younger twenty-somethings, you know?

There's a good sense of mystery and suspense, too. A sort of "who done it" murder mystery.

Considering when this book was published, I think it's quite good and it aged well. I definitely can't say that of other books of this era I've read. This was one of my favorite books when I was a teenager, and I'm glad to say that it remains one of my favorites all these years later!

[Gewbook · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved these as a teenager, but when I went back to read them as an adult, something just didn't click.

[Hannah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Spoiler-ish (no character names or fine details, just general character type references).

I was really hoping this was going to turn out to be a diamond in the rough - a fantasy/sci-fi novel written by a woman I've never heard of and published in the 90s. The main character is a 37 year old woman who has endured hardship and trauma and fought her way back which is an awesome and kind of an unusual main character choice, especially for the time period. I love the bad cover art. I love weird ways people find to insert their favorite animals into novels. I was really ready to love this book. It is not good. The Ghatti characters, which are like big cats that can speak to certain humans with their minds, sound cool but they've been written as two-dimensional boring sidekicks. The initial character death is very woman-in-the-refrigerator-esque and does not contribute to the story in the least. The main bad guy is illustrated as a bad guy with deformity and homosexual behavior which is just nauseatingly tropey. The ending doesn't make any damn sense. Also, the editing was terrible and the book should have been cut by at least 100 pages. I initially had a rating of two stars and I just changed it to one while writing this. It was such a disappointment.

[Mikey · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Doyce’s out of 5

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read for the 2024 PopSugar reading challenge. This is "A book from an animal's POV," although it's certainly not exclusively from an animal's POV, but there are definitely multiple large, talking cats whose thought process we experience.

Last year, there was a local PTA used book sale and I went into it on a whim with the goal of finding the most obscure fantasy book that I could find. I saw the cat riding the horse on this cover, with another cat on the spine, and I knew this was my winner. It's not good, or even especially fun, but I paid $1 for a mass market paperback that I never knew existed before I walked in and that part is fun.

It's different, especially considering that it was published like 30 years ago, which is not nothing. The main character is a woman in her late 30s who has already undergone multiple massive shifts in the life that she expected for herself, the latest of which has her, at the beginning of this book, serving as the human half of a human-cat pair that goes around serving as basically a roaming judicial branch. The cats only speak telepathically. In a very vague way this reminded me of a Kate Elliott book that I read (title forgotten) that involved eagle riders going out and serving as roving magistrates.

It's uncommon for me to read a book where the protagonist starts out at this age, especially a woman. That part is neat, because you really do get a different perspective when you have a more mature woman as opposed to one who is a teen or early 20s, or one who is a man of any age.

The setting is one that began as science fiction and has devolved into fantasy. Some kind of ship either landed intentionally or crashed on the planet of this world and its people had to make a life there. The technology failed spectacularly at a past point in the history and now they're all carrying on, doing the best they can. This was long enough ago in the past (200 years) that it's not super relevant to the plot.

Like many things about the book, it seems like it could have been interesting if it was presented differently, but it's just... not. There is a lot of meandering prose, descriptions of nature, repetitive descriptions of internal conflict that go on for longer than they need to, POV shifts to characters who aren't all that important and whose segments add nothing to the story. I've read books before that had some of this quality and I still liked them, Tad Williams particularly comes to mind. This one just doesn't have the "it." Despite being over 500 pages, it just does not feel fully formed. There are vague gestures to thematic connections that don't really come together. It wants to be a kind of thriller plot but does not have the skill to create that tension. Maybe these are explored more in what is apparently books 2 and 3 of the tale. I won't seek them out. But I definitely got my $1's worth.

[Katherine Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book. I'm quite fond of nonhuman characters, and with a female lead, swords and horses style, and talking cats, I thought this would be perfect for me. I did enjoy the premise, worldbuilding, and there were some clever plot construction and moments. Unfortunately, I found the book bogged down by a lot of distracting exposition. I think if a bunch of that had been cut, the book would have been 30% shorter and the action would have moved at a much more engaging pace. The last 20% of the book things finally started to happen at an exciting pace, risk and danger started to appear--and then the climax was super rushed compared to the long, long slog it took to get there. Overall, very grammatical writing, so no complaints there, and great imagery and description (just so much of it). The characters were ok, but the lead was a bit passive. There was even a point when she turned to a much lower ranking man and asking him the dreaded "so what now?" question. Girl, you're the boss of him! At another point another character accused her of "not letting us love you" which is guaranteed to make someone feel more inclined to be trusting and vulnerable, right? (sarcasm) Unfortunately, I will not be continuing with the series, simply because of the writing style. I just don't want to slog through more of it.

[Leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this up at an Airbnb. It looked to be a unique take on fantasy with a bit of sci-fi thrown in for good measure.

Right off I really liked the world. Humans with the ability to travel through space came to this planet a long time ago, bringing advanced technology. For awhile they had what the indigenous people thought of as magic, but as the people who understood that technology began dying out, and without the resources to get or make more, the advanced technology became a thing of the past.

One of the indigenous races of this planet are called ghatti, large sentient catlike creatures with the ability to communicate telepathically with each other and select humans. A young ghatt will imprint on a human of its choice and they will become a Bonded Pair, working as a traveling circuit judge, mediating disputes using their telepathic powers.

All of that to say it's a very unique spin and I enjoyed it overall. I enjoyed the premise of the book; the politics, characters, and events were interesting. However, I loathed the main character's name (Doyce. REALLY?!?!) to such a degree it made it hard for me not to hate her. Also, the writing was confusing, with weird comma usage and an annoying tendency to talk about things in a way that assumes the reader knows what's going on without it being clear from context. I had to reread passages at times to make sure I comprehended what was going on. The author also sprinkled unusual and/or uncommon words fairly liberally throughout the book. I enjoy learning new words, but after I looked up the definition, I felt that it wasn't used correctly. It was odd. Finally, I felt like the climax was trite and cliched. I was disappointed because I thought the author had more promise.

[robyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think this book just doesn't cut deeply enough in terms of story telling or character building. It's VERY long, at 500 pages, and not enough happens to justify that length. The final conflict is only a couple of pages, and unfortunately it IS the final conflict. The Hobbit is similar, in that the actual encounter with Smaug, despite being the stated point of the entire book, is very brief and we don't even experience it directly - but it turns out that the true conflict is yet to come, and that the true point of the story was actually the journey itself and how it changed our characters. The journey in Ghatti's tale isn't entertaining enough to bear the weight of all those pages, and the anticlimax of that final encounter.

I found that I didn't care much about anyone, and I don't really believe in some of the stated connections of affection or attraction between the characters.

[Mary Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

B&N Summary:

"Their technological resources destroyed, a colonizing expedition from Earth has been stranded on the world of Methuen for over two hundred years. Their continued survival is largely due to the organization of healers known as the Eumedicos and to the Seekers Veritas, a unique group composed of pairs of Bondmates, one human and one ghatti—a telepathic catlike being native to Methuen who bonds with a specific human for life. These Bondmates travel from town to town, settling disputes by truth-reading the minds and emotions of plaintiffs and defendants. While most people respect the Seekers, there are those who fear the ghatti powers. And now someone has begun attacking Seeker pairs.

What no one knows is that this destroyer has targeted one specific pair of Bondmates as special victims—the woman Doyce and the ghatta Khar'pern. For the key to defeating this deadly foe is locked away in Doyce's mind behind barriers even her ghattas has never been able to break down."

This took a while to get through. It was slow to start, and the prose never really grabbed me. I admit, I had to force myself to read it at times, so much other things to read and keep up with. It finally did pick up, and I am glad that I stayed with it and finished the book.

One problem I have is that, for all the time spent in Doyce's head, I can't say I understand her that well at all. I feel a bit like Khar'Pern in that regard, not really feeling close. I can't narrow it down more than that. I don't understand why Jenret seems like such an aloof figure, mysterious and imposing, while Doyce seems like a woman with a crush she won't admit to - and then Jenret seems like a young foolish boy with a crush at the end of it, while Doyce made this big sacrifice and is lost in her head. It makes no sense to me. It seems to be leading toward a cougar situation between them, but I can't tell you why, and it doesn't strike me as compelling. I can't even say that I like Doyce enough to want her to join with Jenret - I mean, she seemed to shake off Oriel's death pretty quickly.

I also don't get why the summary reads as though the bond between Doyce and Khar isn't as strong as others - I don't feel like the bond comes across as strong as, say, between a dragonrider and their dragon in the Pern universe. Again, I cannot articulate exactly why I think that, but it just didn't come across to me as that intense of a thing.

Vesey is a puzzle, as well as the question of whether Gleaners, in and by themselves, are necessarily bad or wrong without Vesey there to lead them astray. I am disappointed that - although the last quarter of the book picked up the pace in action and suspense - Vesey was dispatched over a fight over a medallion that I guess augmented his mind power? Still not entirely clear about what that medallion did or how it aided Doyce and Khar - just seems like there are more questions than answers about it.

So after all of that, I still appreciate the story that is told. I will admit that I am interested to see where it leads, and maybe I will grow to understand and appreciate the bonds between Ghatti and their chosen more. I know that I had read this series before, and I remember vaguely elements and scenes from the first read, but now it is all fresh in my mind, so I will go on to the next book.

[Michelle Sonnier · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this book a long time ago, as a teenager. I valued it for the adventurous plot back then. Now, decades later, I appreciate the character development complexities of adults over 25 (sometimes significantly over) on that adventure. Not that the plot isn't still exciting and well drawn, even though I remembered the "big reveal" from when I first read it, but the characters charmed me more this time.

The issue that I had with the book was the format I read it in. Out of convenience I picked it up in ebook format and it's glaringly obvious that whoever converted this book from hard copy to ecopy took little to no care in the job. Commas are changed to periods at random intervals, and vice versa. Sometimes "cl" is rendered as "d" and sometimes "rn" is rendered as "m". And sometimes it's not.... It's completely random. And considering that one of the main characters has a rn in her name, it pops up quite a bit. There are also issues with page breaks and section breaks. Sometimes different scenes (completely different characters and locations) are jammed together on the page and it's quite confusing when suddenly completely different characters who are miles away from the ones you were just reading about start speaking. And sometimes there's half an empty page for no reason...

This is a good story, well told. Greeno is just poorly served by the formatting. Do yourself a favor and pick this book up in hard copy to enjoy the read.

[Michelle Swanson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The start was boring and I was wondering if this would be a book I'd struggled to read, and it would drag on as far as storyline etc.
But around 40-50 pages it really picked up for me, and I could hardly put the book down the more I got into the better it got for me anyway.

It remind me of Mercedes Lackey valdemar books although with her books its about horses (companions) but the premises of Ghatti and Companions is very similar how the chosen will have to go from town to town administering justice as a judge of sorts.

It does leave on a cliff hanger of sorts but once you read book #2 description it ruins the cliff hanger and warning it also contains quite a few book #1 spoilers listed on the goodreads book description.
Im very much looking forward to seing how book #2 and #3 in this series fairs.

Id say rating this the first few pages 2 star then middle id give a 3-3.5 star tords the end a solid 3.5-4 star.

[Matthew A Gerteisen · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's promising, but it needs better editing

This book has a lot of promise, but at page 59, I have had so many shifts in character groups with zero breaks in the text that I often find myself disjointed and having to reread the last paragraph or two in order to apply the events to the proper characters. Whoever edited this was an absolute idiot that absolutely failed to adopt it to any medium, be it digital or physical. I sincerely hope that the physical books do not have the same run on problems that this digital copy has. I want to finish this book, but I will wait to be notified of a new, properly edited copy with appropriate breaks in the text and story groups.

[Sarah Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book while traveling as a free book offered to customers likely through donations. If you enjoy a good fantasy, you might enjoy this book. In this world, the Ghatti, is a species that look similar to a cat. The Ghatti are telepathic and capable of mind-speech. The Ghatti seek the truth. There are seeker pairs of bonded Ghatti and humans who settle disagreements and discern truths. Seeker pairs are being attacked. The quest begins to seek the truth and find the cause. The secret lies in the main characters past. I look forward to continuing the series if I can find the books.

[Michelle M · Rating 2 out of 5]

2/6
It was ok but disappointing as well.
Read this as my random TBR pick for July and had to force myself through it. The first ‘Part’ was extremely boring and I didn’t feel a connection with Doyce. The mind reading cats were cool, but their human partners are uninteresting. There was a lot of potential for the story but it just fell flat. The mystery/thriller part was the only thing that kept me interested but that didn’t last for long. I’m slightly interested in what happens in the next two books, but not enough to actually read them lol

[Ethelbonnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the story, and will read the 2nd one, but the e-book really needed a proofreader. It looks sort of like someone scanned the handwritten manuscript into a computer, and then just let it decide what was on the page. Which really ended with far too many words like "daw" where it obviously should have read "claw". Unfortunately, my brain gets wicked distracted by it. But I really liked the story and style of storytelling.

[C.C. Miranda · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book for lovers of cats and fantasy. When I read this back when it first came out I didn't know there was to be more to come. Going to have to track down the rest of the series now to find out how things on Methuen (the world in the book) progressed. It also made me miss my huge cat, Murf who I think might just have been a Ghatt in hiding.

[Amanda Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greeno's tale of human Seekers with their cat-like ghatti bondmates is an interesting adventure. I thoroughly enjoyed this sci-fi, spec-fic, novel because the ending wasn't predictable and the characters were relatable.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reread of an old favorite. Mom bought me the trilogy for Christmas one year a) because it was complete and b) she thought it would keep me busy for Christmas vacation. It lasted about two and a half days for all three, i whipped through them. Fond memories

[Danell M Hiltz · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorites

I read the entire series years ago and am now reading them. A refreshing fantasy, the environs and characters well developed & described. Unlike the chaos of war in typical fantasies - more in keeping with such as Robin Hobbs or Anne McCaffrey.

[Murray Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

So what happens when you're partnered with a giant cat that can read your thoughts? The heroine is tasked to solve problems, the latest one being who's going after her peers. It's not who she or her companion expect.

[James]

Stranded on the world of Methuen for more than two hundred years, a colonizing expedition from Earth depends for their continued survival on the healing powers of the Eumedicos and the Seekers Veritas. Original.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slow start but around page 200 it started getting better

[Darbywoot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fucking wonderful!!!

[Talia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reminds me of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Leroni. The climax was a bit anti-climactic.

[Jodi Ralston · Rating 4 out of 5]

A favorite of my younger years, I had to rebuy and reread it.

[Jazz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book extremely enjoyable. A lot of people seem to dislike the writing style, but I found it beautiful if read carefully and slowly.

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

📖3.5⭐️