For Love of Mother-Not by Alan Dean Foster

Pip and Flinx: Book 1
Description
He was just a freckle-faced, redheaded kid with green eyes and a strangely campelling stare when Mather Mastiff first saw him an the auctioneer’s block. One hundred credits and he was hers. For years the old woman was his only family. She loved him, fed him, taught him everything she knew — even let him keep the deadly flying snake he called Pip. Then Mother Mastiff mysteriously disappeared and Flinx took Pip to tail her kidnappers. Across the forests and swamps of the winged world called Moth, their only weapons were Pip’s venom . . . and Flinx’s unusual Talents.

This is a re-read, I read it before and when I saw it as an e-book I bought it so I could re-read it. Half way through I remembered that it is the first in a series, so the story is finished, but not really. Some things are not explained so you know there is more.

This is science-fiction so you do have to suspend believability at points, but what I liked is the non-earthly details meshed, they were all consistent. Like the author had created a blueprint for his ‘world’ and stuck to it. It had a good plot, the main plot was easy to follow, the subplots not so much but added interesting details. There was action and character development in the right amounts for the plot.