HAZARDOUS LIES

A government inspector faces down a corporate coverup in Wallace’s debut thriller.

Former mechanical engineer Jon Barrett is still reeling from a deadly accident that cost him his job—an accident that his bosses pinned on him. Luckily, he’s found work with a new industrial safety program for the Department of the Interior, investigating the same sorts of accidents as the one that still haunts his memory. When an explosion occurs at the Chemtrifuge Chemicals plant in Charleston, West Virginia, Jon is dispatched to figure out what went wrong. His mission is narrowly constrained: He must show that he’s doing his job in order to keep the program funded, but he can’t do anything that will rile any power players. He arrives at the plant just as the employees are attempting to squash all information about the source of the explosion—and they are not at all pleased to have someone from Washington poking around. Workers are dead, however, and one man—a senator’s son—is missing, meaning this isn’t the kind of case that can be swept under the rug. As the media and environmentalists swarm, Jon finds himself in a bind: Allowing the problem to go unaddressed could lead to danger at other plants, increasing the risk of more accidents like the one he can’t stop thinking about. But exposing the truth could cost him his job…and maybe even his life. Wallace offers rich details about the inner workings of a chemical plant and the many personalities that exist within its orbit, which keeps even the more technical material from feeling dry. Here he describes Cain Quinn, a senior adviser at Chemtrifuge and one of Jon’s primary antagonists: “It was not about the money, he had plenty of that. And it was not just about winning—it was about destroying. He did not want Chemtrifuge to simply exist alongside other competitors…He wanted to destroy all the company’s competitors, and everyone who had anything to do with them.” Readers will not want to put this one down.

An immersive and timely industrial-accident thriller.