RIGGED

Taylor offers a cracking thriller about an eco-terrorist who questions his mission.

Environmental Officer Ty O’Connor has been tasked with monitoring the activities of his crewmates on the world’s largest submersible rig, Gallagher-Cross, and they mostly just find him to be a nuisance. But his unassuming presence is only a cover for his membership in Living Earth Treaty, an eco-activist group that’s weary of trying to take down oil companies with press releases and protests. They’ve recruited Ty for a deadly mission involving 30 pounds of explosives and remote detonators, which he’s smuggled aboard the rig. Thus far, he’s been fueled by rage at oil company–led massacres that he witnessed in Africa. But his anger is giving way to doubt, leaving Ty “caught between his fear that his mission would fail and the nearly equal fear that it would succeed. Either way,” he muses, “the cost could be astronomical.” As Jarvis Shroeder, Ty’s enigmatic recruiter/handler, tersely suggests, the toll may also include his wife and daughter if Ty doesn’t fulfill his assignment: “They’re safe…as long as you do what you’re told.” Ty is also trying to figure out how to bond with his father, Aiden, who’s also the rig’s captain and dubious of his son’s intentions, as an online search suggests to him: “You’ve been pretty active, haven’t you? Made a real name for yourself?” What unfolds, over a white-knuckle weekend, is a tug of war between Ty’s struggle to square his resentments toward his dad—“the powerful Company man” who rarely came home—with his ambiguous attitude toward violence, which has placed him at the mercy of Jarvis and his equally amoral sidekick, Graham McKinty.

A hero seeking some measure of redemption is a classic element of many action stories, and Taylor handles it well here, particularly as the narrative builds toward its conclusion. Ty and his father have clear issues with each other, but they must set them aside and figure out how to work together. Readers can think of it, perhaps, as the coastal Newfoundland answer to stories that mine similar territory, such as the 1936 crime melodrama The Petrified Forest. Readers will find much that’s relatable in Ty’s struggles to reclaim his identity during a seemingly endless run of “tests” from Jarvis that leave him “way past being tired of this game, of feeling like the only person who didn’t know what the rules were. He had to do something. Anything.” At the same time, these inner struggles play out as Taylor provides periodic bits of information to keep readers engaged—such as the disquieting possibility that Jarvis and Ty’s wife, Raine, may be more than mere friends and fellow eco-travelers. Whatever angle the reader follows, the end result is a brooding, atmospheric eco-thriller that successfully weaves together the larger questions it raises—particularly, whether an end can ever justify a terrible means, no matter how evil one’s target is. Overall, it’s a full-on thrill ride whose complexity may exceed some readers’ expectations.

A rousing adventure that delivers a powerful warning against militant excesses amid plenty of action.