Water-powered mills, once the backbone of American industrial might, run as an emblem throughout Big Inca versus a New Pony Express Rider. The novel overlaps layers of history and ambition, geography and resettled ethnicity, growth and decay as they center in the once bustling town of yrubBury, where Bill is dispatched fresh out of college.
His mission is vague, misty, constantly shifting – and highly lucrative – even when he has no clue where it’s going. His coded messages to and from his boss in corporate HQ are his lifeline to the outside world.
It’s exciting, of course, to see preservation take shape. As what’s old becomes new again when his international conglomerate starts recasting a backwater town for its own ends, however clandestine. As we discover, behind the renovation of the decaying mills is a design for an isolated facility for a military-industrial behemoth.
At the heart of it all, Bill’s a solitary innocent puppet at the bidding of a distant boss pulling the strings from afar – a station agent out on the frontier. And then, running frantically along it.
Will he survive? And what of the mills?
Everything depends on the confrontation with the rival Big Inca.
~*~
The novel is available here.
Jnana's Red Barn 