Sinkhole — Andre Jute

Sinkhole by Andre Jute 

“Jute has clearly conducted a great deal of research into everything he describes, investing the novel with an air of prophecy. 

Its moral and ecological concerns are important. 

If the disturbing predictions of Sinkhole should prove correct…” 

The Times Literary Supplement 

It's nearly lunchtime in a medium-sized mid-West city: a party of school-children are shepherded into a department store: the state senator's wife sips a pre-lunch drink: the local drugs kingpin cuts a deal: two alert cops make an arrest. A normal day, until the entire downtown of the city vanishes into a massive hole in the ground. 

With chillingly accurate detail, André Jute describes how greed, ignorance and mismanagement accelerate remorseless geological processes to erode the very foundations of the earth on which we stand, and build. With incandescent imagination, and a rigorous knowledge of the specialist techniques involved, Sinkhole describes the desperate efforts to retrieve a handful of survivors from the maelstrom underfoot. 

Individual acts of courage, honed reflexes and an iron command of esoteric skills could snatch the living from the jaws of the earth. But the few men with the nerve and the vision to challenge the abyss discover that fear, panic, obsession, guilt, the grindingly sluggish mechanisms of bureaucracy, all conspire to hinder the rescue. 

The tension is electric: the finale explosive. 

-- jacket blurb by John Blackwell

-- from Secker & Warburg's original hardcover edition