Crude by Mike Bond
What’s It About?
After his company’s oil platform explodes, Ross Bullock worries powerful political forces are trying to shut him down for his open concerns about the threat of nuclear war. So he puts together a team of specialists to fight back before it’s too late.
Mike Bond’s Crude: Ukraine, Oil and Nuclear War begins with a terrifying shark attack on a diver in the South China Sea where he battles for his life while trying to accomplish his goal: setting an explosive charge under a huge gas and oil platform.
It’s an exciting, heart-stopping scene, but we soon learn this book is about much more than just these kinds of dramatic moments.
Instead, this is an incredibly different kind of “ripped from the headlines” story which amazingly — and jarringly at times — uses real-life public figures and organizations and events to make the author’s point of view very clear.
The Imminent Threat of Nuclear War
That view is summed up at the beginning of the book by the main character, Ross Bullock, owner of the oil company whose massive platform was blown up, who is convinced the world is headed toward total catastrophic nuclear war unless someone can stop it.
“The U.S. and Russia have more than 11,000 nuclear weapons, which will kill all life on this planet many times over,” Bullock says in a public plea at the beginning of Crude. “In a nuclear war, every city and town in the U.S., Europe and Asia will be vaporized in a fire five times hotter than the center of the sun, exploding at warp speed incinerating everything. Billions of people atomized, billions more dying in agony from burns and radiation. Countless trillions of tons of fiery radioactive debris — tiny bits of people, cities, highways, forests, farms — choking the skies for decades and turning most of the earth into a darkened frozen ball with no survivors.”
When his company Rawhide Energy’s oil platform explodes in a tower of flames from the deliberate explosion, killing everyone there except for one survivor — a young geologist named Liz Chaplin — Bullock is convinced that powerful political forces from the White House and elsewhere are trying to shut down his company because of his opposition to their policies he believes are heading the world toward nuclear war.
Soon there is more destruction of Rawhide Energy refineries and equipment — and other people are dying. The search leads to further dangers around the world in Mongolia, Indonesia, Washington DC, and Ukraine.
Team of Heroes — and Real-Life Villains
Desperate to save his company and even more committed to the quest he feels is necessary to save the world, Bullock recruits a team of people to help him battle the people in power opposing him.
The team includes Chaplin, the surviving geologist from the platform explosion; an old friend and former Navy Seal named Turk Holman; an unexpected ally in an eccentric Wyoming sheriff, Lyle Brant, who is battling his own life-threatening personal issue at the same time; a friendly senator from Kansas, Sidney Hollis; and a New York Times reporter Lily Hsiu who sides with Bullock because she believes her editors at the Times are slanting their coverage to protect the President and others.
But the really stunning part of this book is the way author Mike Bond places prominent real-life figures as characters who must be confronted to save the world. Bond’s high-profile targets for scrutiny in Crude include President Biden; former President Obama; big media outlets like the New York Times; and other specific political figures who have been part of the U.S. government that he blames for the nuclear crisis.
Master of the Existential Thriller
In Crude, Bond creates a fictional story to make events involving all of them turn out the way he would like things to be in real life, culminating in a shocking political crisis at the White House itself that changes history.
Depending on their political views, readers may not side with many of Bond’s political beliefs which he preaches to the reader continuously throughout the pages of the otherwise fictional story. Because of that, this is a very different kind of political thriller.
At the same time, Crude is an exciting, entertaining and definitely thought-provoking ride along the way.
It is the latest in a dozen popular, highly acclaimed novels for Bond, a former CEO of an international energy company and a journalist and a political figure who has been described by critics as the “master of the existential thriller.”
Called “master of the existential thriller” by BBC, “one of America’s best thriller writers” by Culture Buzz, and “one of the 21st century’s most exciting authors” by the Washington Times, Mike Bond is a best-selling novelist, war and human rights journalist, and environmental activist. He has covered guerrilla wars, death squads, and military dictatorships in Latin America and Africa, Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, and ivory poaching and other environmental battles in East Africa and Asia.
His critically acclaimed novels take the reader into intense situations in the world’s most perilous places, into wars, revolutions, dangerous love affairs and political and corporate conspiracies, making “readers sweat with [their] relentless pace” (Kirkus) and drawing them “into a land and a time I had not known but left me with my senses reeling” (NetGalley Reviews).
His books have been named among the best of the year by reviewers and readers alike. He speaks multiple languages, has climbed and trekked over 50,000 miles on every continent from the Antarctic to Siberia, and is at home in some of the most primitive and dangerous places on the planet.
Publish Date: 7/1/2024
Genre: Fiction, Thrillers
Author: Mike Bond
Page Count: 465 pages
Publisher: Big City Press