Clink Street
Featuring: Godfredo Roco; Alexandra Wong; Max Burns
295 pages ISBN: 1911525298 EAN: 9781911525295 Kindle: B06XKRK9SL Paperback / e-Book Add to Wish List
While Max Burns is still in Swiss boarding school, his English parents
leave a high-society party in their helicopter after news arrives that
their partner in the high finance world has been arrested for fraudulent
dealings. The helicopter crashes. Later, in 2008, a plan for
THE EXPANSION of the Panama
Canal draws Max's attention as an engineer. While on paper it's a
wonderful challenge, he soon notices drawbacks. And the world of
dodgy financial dealings seems never far away.
The Canal is not wide enough for the giant container ships now
shuttling back and forth to China, and (in reality as well as the fiction) a
Chinese firm has been planning a joint new canal with Nicaragua which
would be larger and would take much trade from Panama. If Panama
expanded its link that would perhaps scupper the opposing plans, so I
can see the validity of the move. Author Christoph Martin who has lived
in Panama, explains that each ship's passage costs two hundred
thousand dollars, cash down, providing the small country of Panama
with two billion dollars a year. That's quite enough money to lure all
kinds of dodgy dealers.
Naturally, the American Embassy is highly interested in anything
concerning the canal. Especially the staff hopes an American firm will
win the construction bid for expansion. Max Burns, answering his friend
Godfredo Roco's request to join a local Panamanian bidding team as a
geoengineer, arrives from grey England to a lush tropical paradise. Not
long passes before he realises he's out of his depth. Dr. Alexandra
Wong, a hydrologist on his team, isn't impressed by the parties with
bikini-clad girls that occur regularly. The local ecologists want to
preserve the wetlands and their natural freshwater from canal locks, so
any proposal has to take nature into account, and then there are
paleontologists awaiting excavations; an admirable level of detail is
shown.
I was interested in the way the bidding process is described, and the
double-dealing, industrial espionage, CIA involvement and violence that
Swiss author Christoph Martin imagines might go on behind the
scenes. His adventure is based on his life in Switzerland and in
Panama, where he worked as a lawyer for a decade. Men and women
with a lot to gain and everything to lose populate his increasingly dark
novel THE EXPANSION. I
recommend the read to any thriller fan who wants the real background
behind the stories that make the headlines. This is an adult read with
strong language but less violence than a James Bond film.
In politics and big business, truth is a matter of opinion.
Straddling the storyworlds of Panama, Washington and London,
The Expansion follows British-born geomatic engineer Max
Burns, whose revolutionary water-saving system wins him the
esteemed position of head engineer for one of the 21st
century's most politically contested megaprojects: the
expansion of the Panama Canal.
For Max it is a dream come true: not only is he able to work
closely with construction giant and old high-school friend
Godfredo Roco in one of the most beautiful tropical
environments, but it's the kind of job Max has been working
toward his entire career.
Yet in the arena of global trade and diplomacy, stakes are
high, and when a senior official of the Panama Canal
Administration is found dead, Max finds himself in the frame
for sabotage and murder, and at the center of a web of
political intrigue and betrayal that reaches far beyond the
idyllic shores of Central America. The only person Max can
trust is his new-found love, Karis Deen, a scientist with
the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Except Karis
herself holds a secret that could not only destroy Max, but
could change the entire balance of world power.
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