A tight, heart-pounding page turner.
Lush jungle scenery provides some of the deadly terrain in the second installment of The Response Files series, Jungle Heist. This sweaty, testosterone-fueled thriller opens at the base of a lucrative gold mine that sits central to nowhere in Ghana. A heist is in the works and the take is huge, more than eight tons of freshly mined gold, all meticulously accounted for and organized onto several pallets, awaiting official transport. Several players have their eyes on a piece of the golden pie, but not everyone will be able to reap the reward. Dirty politicians, hardened criminals, coerced laborers, hired guns and crooked investors put everything on the line for what amounts to an ambitious caper drenched in the humidity and misery of a merciless jungle. While there is a lot to gain, there is even more to lose if things go sour. The Associate is back and has an empire of crime to maintain, the Ghanaian President has a volatile government to worry about, a Somali pirate’s reputation is on the line, and a brave multinational group is put in place to set matters right. This team of top-notch specialists is tasked with recovering the gold before it disappears from the country. No easy mission when you’re fighting greed, corruption and an unforgiving climate.
Phayre writes with so much first-hand information that you’ll swear you can hear the venomous snakes slithering just outside your window or catch a glimpse of a drone in the night sky as you read Jungle Heist. Intricate details pave the way for chaos as readers are given a compressed education on gold mining procedures, baboon behavior, jungle ecology, and international politics. Initially we only get to know the criminal elements, slowly forming opinions about who we want to end up with the valuable prize or who we want to fail grandly. It takes several chapters to meet the novel’s heroes, so it’s especially clever the way the author is able to build out their personalities with such camaraderie, humor and, especially in the case of poor Raj, so much personal humiliation, that you can’t not root for them. Well conceived and expertly executed, Rob Phayre’s Jungle Heist is a tight, heart-pounding page turner that will keep you engaged until every last gold bar has been accounted for.
