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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A menacing and atmospheric thriller!, September 25, 2006
I love a good thriller, especially if it has an exotic location, a sunken treasure, sexy characters, and all kinds of menace. Dark Gold delivers all the above and more. The story opens with three college grads, Jack, Rock, and Duff, about to embark on a world tour, a last hurrah before they have to get serious about real life. However, Jack's wandering older brother Dan has gone missing somewhere in Mexico. The last anyone has heard from him was an enigmatic postcard from Puerto Vallarta four months ago. So the three friends decide to start their trip in Mexico to hunt down Dan. As readers of The Ruins will attest, these quests never end well. Early on, Jack has a scary encounter with a drug-dealing biker gang. No one will admit to knowing anything about Dan, but Jack does learn the name of a town that doesn't mean anything to him---Punta Perdida. None of the locals are willing to ferry Jack, Duff, and Rock there to investigate, for any price. But fate (and a beautiful woman) leads them to Leo Bellocheque, a wealthy Caribbean Islander with a million dollar yacht and a drop-dead gorgeous crew of two. Leo's intrigued by their story and offers them a lift. Punta Perdida is a dangerous place. The local priest has been deafened and muted. Things aren't looking at all good for Dan. But Jack and his friends soon discover what enticed Dan to this desolate location; the lure of a fortune in sunken gold. Of course, in a place like Punta Perdida, you never know what else might be in the water... I don't want to tell any more, because the joy of a novel like this is the plotting. The story is fast-paced and offered me big, gasp-out-loud surprises right up to the very end. There are definitely elements of the story that are familiar from many other books and films, but Angsten has done a great job making familiar thriller conventions seem fresh and new. A big part of it is the writing, which is way above average. It's a pleasure to read a thriller with a nice turn of phrase and characters with real depth to them. I often felt a desire to learn more about these people and their back stories that wasn't always satisfied. You can't complain too loudly, though, about characters being overly interesting. In the heading of this review I used the words menacing and atmospheric, which sound a lot better than creepy. But the truth of the matter is that Angsten creeped me out. Never has Mexico seemed more foreign or scarier. Seriously, I began to feel a little worried about my own friends down there! And just reading an underwater scene about something that's never seen during an early dive in the novel had the hair on the back of my neck standing up. I read this book in two days. This is good and bad. I want more! I can't wait to see what Angsten comes up with next. What a great new discovery!
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Compelling Read...Yet Oddly Unsatisfying, November 17, 2007
This review is from: Dark Gold (Paperback)
This is a difficult book to review. From the moment I began reading, I was hooked for the first 200 pages or so in that "I don't want to put it down" phase. Then the story began languishing a bit until picking up steam to tie all the loose ends together in a bloody finale. The last 150 pages kept me strangely uneasy as everything became predictable and some very hard to believe underwater SCUBA episodes left me laughing. The book is essentially about 3 friends who postpone a world adventure to go to Puerto Vallarta in search of Jack Duran's wandering shiftless brother, Dan. They encounter a series of characters in a series of violent incidents before finally ending up on an expensive yacht with two beautiful women and a mysterious Caribbean who may or may not know something about Jack's brother. Ultimately there is a search for long lost sunken gold complicated by deadly sea creatures, modern day pirates, and double crosses. The nearby islanders are scary individuals who participate in African satanic rituals and who certainly have no interest in helping the gold seekers. What mysteries do they hide? There is more blood spilled in this novel than seemingly in the Civil War. What can you say about a thriller that includes drug dealing biker gangs, menacing thugs and locales, beautiful women in bikinis, satanic rituals, black magic, sea monsters, sunken treasure, double and triple crosses, mysterious characters, and bloody action sequences? You can see why your interest initially builds and builds until the payoff becomes cloudier and cloudier. "Dark Gold" is well written and edited. The pacing is furious at times and languid at other times. There is a great deal of action but Jack Duran, the protagonist, is the most clumsy or unlucky man in literature as he suffers every sort of bump, scrape, wound, beating, and stabbing imaginable--by books end, I was calling the blood bank to get him help. Perhaps the murkiest aspects of this novel were the underlying existential questions concerning personal and group values and mores that were explored and dissected throughout the action...and often in a very unsubtle manner. What constitutes the soul of a man? How much is a human life worth...or a breath of air when underwater with gold in your hands and diminishing air in your tank? Can a life of aimless wandering be redeemed? What will a son do for a mother's love? The questions and existential dilemmas continue endlessly. All in all, a strong 3 star read.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
H.P. Lovecraft meets James Crumley, July 5, 2006
This excellent novel is a difficult book to quantify: Part mystery, part travelogue, part historical novel, part horror yarn, and all thriller. Usually such an effort slops to the floor an unreadable mishmash. Not so Angsten. It's hard to believe this is a debut novel given Angsten's deft handling of the various threads in his storyline. This book grabs you and holds you; I even took *Dark Gold* with me to a Fourth of July fireworks show. A young college grad takes two friends and looks for his older sibling while enjoying a great adventure now school is over. While traipsing through Mexico, they pick up the older boy's trail as well as a travelling millionaire yacthsman whose two companions are drop dead gorgeous women. After one of the adventurers is beaten and slashed, it becomes apparent there's something sinister in the older brother's disappearance. The adventurers trail the missing lad to an insular, mysterious and violently xenophobic village where it appears the missing young man likely lost his life. Angsten's world is dark and murky, peopled with beauty and malice, gold and monsters, love and betrayal. It's been a long time since I've read a novel as thoroughly absorbing as this effort. Well done!
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