This adventure novel is definitely for you, men.
In “Pure Gold,” we meet Clyde McFadden, a former aerospace engineer who has moved to Black Pine, Idaho, to farm. He has a cow, some chickens, and a dog, and lives a quiet and unhurried life. One day he leaves his farm for several hours and is surprised to find that his hens have stopped laying. They return to normal after a day off, but the next time he leaves, they stop laying again. What on earth is upsetting his chickens?
Clyde starts to notice other strange things happening. A ditch running round his field had been dug to a certain depth, but now it’s not as deep, as though it’s been filled in. But it’s even, and not bumpy—whoever filled it was careful to be surreptitious.
Meanwhile, at a company called Geostat Technologies, the executives are worried. Two of their best employees, men named Alan and Reggie, had been working on a project to take satellite pictures of the earth. Although they were two of the most talented scientists around, the experiment failed. Alan and Reggie left the company, but the men in charge felt that something was wrong somehow. They call in Pete, a specialist, and ask him to analyze all the data. Why had the satellite failed? After looking it over from every angle, Pete comes to an astonishing conclusion. The experiment hadn’t failed – the wrong chip had been used on earth to decode the signals sent from the satellite. But what did that mean?
More curious every day, Clyde starts snooping. He sees large tracks leading into the barn on the ranch next door – the ranch that has been abandoned for years. Going over to investigate, he discovers a false floor built into the barn, and under that, a mine shaft. Going down, he finds a huge excavation project under way, and thick veins of gold running through the walls.
Alan and Reggie had found a way to use the satellite to locate deposits of gold under the earth’s crust, and were systematically working their way across the United States to mine all the gold they could. Now that Clyde has stumbled on their secret, he will be left to die in the mine, shackled to a pole. It will take all Clyde’s resources to make it out alive.
I’m of two minds about this book. The story was intriguing, the plot thought-out and convincing. It was the execution that bothered me. There was a lot of unnecessary description, a bunch of stuff thrown in for no reason at all, strange changes in point of view. If this book had been edited more thoroughly, it would be an outstanding book. As it is, I’d call it a good book that wasn’t allowed to live up to its full potential. Read it for the interesting plot and just ignore the rest.
(This book was published in 2002 by Cedar Fort.)
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