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Summary
Summary
Straight from today's headlines, a gripping thriller set amid the cultural and environmental wars rocking the Pacific Northwest byDatelinecorrespondent and bestselling author John Hockenberry. Francine Smoholla occupies a precarious position. As a U.S. government marine biologist, she is fighting to save salmon threatened by the dams that supply Washington's hydroelectric power. But as a Chinook Indian, she finds herself torn between the colliding forces of technology and environmentalism. She has seen the catastrophic effects the dams have on her tribe's ancestral lands, livelihood, and traditional ways of life. When power company workers and forest service employees start turning up dead with elaborate native harpoons in their backs, suspicion quickly falls on the Chinook. Wondering just how far her tribe will go to protect their community, Francine quietly begins her own investigation. As the death count rises, a right-wing extremist rides the wave of resulting violence to further his own twisted agenda. His son Duke is caught up in his plans but harbors a secret admiration for the Chinook and their traditions, an admiration that blossoms into something much deeper when he meets Francine. As heavy rains threaten the strength of the dams and old hatreds reignite, a long foretold Indian prophecy of apocalypse looms ever closer.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Like the Y2K apocalypse that never happened, this doomsday thriller goes bust. Hockenberry, Dateline NBC correspondent and author of Moving Violations (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award), tries to cram too many reportorial themes into his bulging narrative: the displacement of Pacific Northwest Chinook tribes, the questionable merits of salmon hatcheries and federal dams, the dangers of nuclear power and the threat posed by white supremacist fringe groups. There's a plot buried under the mountain of issues, but it's actually more of a highly convoluted premise. A Chinook warrior named Charley Shen-oh-way, long assumed dead, has begun slaughtering employees of a federal salmon hatchery to avenge the government's appropriation of sacred Indian ground. His half-Chinook daughter Francine, director of the hatchery, intuits Charley's involvement in the savage murders and withholds incriminating evidence, aided by her wildly improbable love interest, Duke McCurdy, a white supremacist radio provocateur with a secret heart of gold. Meanwhile, Jack Charnock, an unstable weapons researcher who's at last perfected a portable implosion device, has just been terminated from nearby Hanford Nuclear Reservation, and isn't happy. These and other unsympathetic, one-dimensional characters link up implausibly to announce the novel's themes, even at the most intimate moments ("They have always betrayed me, my mother's eyes," she whispered. "Hate betrays me," Duke whispered back. "Who can escape his tribe?") Even Francine's semicomatose white mother stays on point, robotically intoning the Icelandic word for "big flood." Hockenberry, a one-time radio reporter in the Pacific Northwest, has enthusiastically researched the region, but this silly, pretentious novel doesn't show off either writer or culture to best advantage. Agent, Gloria Loomis. (May 17) Forecast: Hockenberry's first book, Moving Violations, was a national bestseller, but as a memoir, its sales bounced high off his fame as an NPR commentator and TV reporter who's also a paraplegic. Some attention will accrue to his first novel because of his continued media presence, and blurbs from Bill McKibben and William Dietrich will draw in browsers, but when all is said and done, he's not much of a thriller writer and, ultimately, sales will reflect this. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Chilling first novel about hatred as the handmaiden of terrorism, by Dateline NBC correspondent Hockenberry (a memoir: Moving Violations , 1995). The stage is the Pacific Northwest, the time is approximately now, the actors are disparate groups whose tolerance for each other never wavers from zero. The local Native American population is Hockenberry's main focus. Dispossessed by the US government's largely well-meant efforts to make life better for the majority, the indigenous Chinooks become a bitter, smoldering minority. The Columbia/Snake River system of dams that brings hydroelectric power to Seattle has wiped out ancient Celito Falls and the adjacent Indian village. No ordinary loss this, and no commonplace village, but a community reaching as far back as the Chinooks themselves. Tribal legend, however, has it that a warrior-hero will appear one day to restore the waters, restock them with salmon, and wreak a longed-for vengeance on the white oppressors. Meantime, the US also serves as the hate object of a dramatically different though equally resentful group: right-wing extremists. The McCurdys, father and son, are point men for that implacable hard-core segment tirelessly plotting the overthrow of the government. Add to this an unappreciated, ill-treated physicist, Jack Charnock, whose largely forgotten work with nuclear weaponry comes to unexpected fruition, and you have a witches' brew of extraordinary volatility. The warrior-hero makes his prophesied appearance. Government people meet untimely ends. Those charged with protecting it cast anxious eyes at the suddenly vulnerable dam system. Charnock's baseball-sized doomsday bombs wind up in exactly the wrong hands, and now, as denouement swiftly approaches, the question is: Can anything at all diffuse this apocalyptic hatred? Hockenberry strays occasionally into melodrama, but for the most part he makes it all seem disconcertingly plausible: a gripping, unnerving debut thriller.
Booklist Review
Journalist and memoirist Hockenberry's first novel is an intelligent, capacious, slightly gothic, and altogether provocative thriller set in the dramatically beautiful but culturally divisive Pacific Northwest. The Columbia River, once wild and gleaming with salmon, has been harnessed by dams and poisoned by the Hanford Nuclear Reservation; now it's the site of a series of ritualized murders with an unmistakable Chinook theme. Francine Smohalla, a marine biologist and living symbol of the region's ecological conflicts as the granddaughter of the white man who built the Grand Coulee Dam and the daughter of a Chinook Indian dead-set against the white man's ways, discovers the first corpse, and meets Duke McCurdy, the son of rabid white supremacists, over the second. Their unlikely romance is set against unrelentingly high suspense as a flood threatens to overwhelm the dams; a disgruntled, mystically inclined nuclear chemist completes unauthorized work on a portable nuclear bomb; Duke's hate-crazed father takes on an Indian-run casino; the tribe plans a salmon festival; and Hanford's head of security, a black man enamored of Jimi Hendrix, catches on to a catastrophic terrorist plot. This isn't a perfect novel, but any kinks are easily forgotten in the torrent of Hockenberry's imaginative plot, ardent prose, knowledgeable passion for the land, and free-flowing compassion. Donna Seaman
Library Journal Review
In the center of this timely and topical work of ecofiction are the nusuh, Chinook for "salmon." As the salmon are endangered by the multiple dams of the Columbia River, so are the Native people and their traditions. Francine Smohalla is a marine biologist in charge of the salmon hatchery at the Bonneville Dam complex. Half-white and half-Chinook, she experiences the stress of living in two worlds. Complementing and escalating her emotional difficulties are four men who want to "free the river": her father, Charley Shen-oh-way, who has returned after being thought dead for 30 years and who is now killing people; Jack Charnock, a superannuated but brilliant weapons designer from the notorious Hanford Nuclear Reservation; Roy McCurdy, a virulent Aryan Nation type; and Roy's son Duke, who was raised to share his father's beliefs but falls in love with Francine. The plot is complex, the action violent and bizarre, the psychology believable, and the climax frightening and surreal. This is a strong first novel by a well-known journalist whose autobiographical Moving Violations was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Recommended for all public libraries. Jack Hafer, Chesterfield Cty. P.L., VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.