Eclipse by Richard North Patterson Pan, HK$100
Richard North Patterson's thriller comes highly recommended - by no less a pulp connoisseur than Bill Clinton, who knows a decent thriller when he reads one. In Eclipse, Patterson makes a bid to be the American John le Carr? circa The Constant Gardener. Damon Pierce is a lawyer on the verge of a mental breakdown. Bored rigid by his job and newly divorced, he does what any self-pitying lawyer would do - he contacts an old flame. In this case, it is Marissa Okari, whose husband Bobby leads a freedom movement in the African nation of Luandia. Although it sounds all-too fictional, Luandia's problems are all-too believable: every nation and every nasty oil company on earth wants its hands on the impoverished country's energy reserves. When Bobby Okari leads a march against an especially nasty conglomerate, PetroGlobal, his act of defiance ends with the protestors being slaughtered; he is also framed for killing three PetroGlobal employees. And then Marissa receives Pierce's e-mail. Loosely based on Ken Saro-Wiwa's human rights battles against the Shell oil company in Nigeria, Eclipse offers a compelling depiction of 21st-century exploitation.
