Morgan Hatch’s debut thriller, Gone to Ground, is like a pyramid of Southern California crime and rich in unscrupulous invention. The story takes place mostly in an impoverished area of the East San Fernando Valley and involves the full spectrum of people struggling to get by. They may have heard about a Las Vegas to Los Angeles high-speed train, but it seems as imminent as a bridge to Mars. They have no idea what is, in fact, barrelling down the tracks toward them, how easily their futures will be manipulated, and how flimsy are the protections society offers.
At the bottom of the crime pyramid is a thick layer of teens and young adults involved in various petty offenses, including truancy and occasionally more lethal drug-dealing. The layer above them is smaller, occupied by scammers and cheaters who are gaming the system in whatever way they can. Even higher up is a strata of property developers and politicians whose intentions are purportedly community-minded, but in reality reflect little regard for the people affected by their actions. At the pinnacle is the mastermind that interfaces between all these layers, a man with no social conscience at all, George Jones.
Jones is a creative, no-holds-barred fixer. His specialty is coming on scene, anywhere in the world, where a land-gobbling urban transit node is needed. The thing about such nodes is that, in an urban area, people and buildings and businesses are there already. What happens to them? Where do they go? And who takes the heat for removing them?
A formidable array of pieces must be assembled, as cheaply as possible, in order to make such a construction deal a reality. In Jones’s playbook, arm-twisting, political pressure and blackmail are only beginning moves. The Las Vegas to Los Angeles high-speed train, which has languished for years in bureaucratic wrangling, is just the kind of project he relishes. Of course, there’s big money to be made.
Yet, George Jones is not the protagonist of this complicated tale. That role falls to Javier Jimenez, a local high school senior who begins to see all the layers of the pyramid. At first, he’s mostly worried about his younger brother, increasingly involved in the local drug scene. But when a dam bursts and floods the 500 vacant acres dubbed Dogtown, destroying a homeless encampment and forcing its inhabitants to relocate, his suspicions start to grow. When several suspicious deaths occur, he starts to investigate.
Javier is a good person with a great many life challenges, but lack of imagination is not one of them. At times he’s more than a little reckless, despite the dangerous people he knows are involved in the larger scheme here. Perhaps they’re too ready to dismiss the possible risk a Hispanic high schooler poses for them; if that’s what’s going on, it’s the biggest mistake made by this group, which makes very few.
Hatch’s short chapters focus on first one level of the pyramid then another. For a while you may feel like you have a lot of disconnected pieces and must trust that they will start to assemble themselves in a coherent picture. Which they do, with dazzling creativity.
For a first book, Gone to Ground shows considerable skill in juggling many balls at once and in creating convincing characters in Javier and his family, including the cousin he works for in her auto-towing business, Betzaida. Hatch also deserves praise for constructing his plot around a significant social issue – the impact of exploitative property development on communities. He’s successfully turned what on the surface might sound like a somewhat dry topic into a lively and memorable tale, one you may remember when you hear about property development schemes much closer to home.
Hatch is a long-time teacher in the Los Angeles public school system, so has a solid understanding of the mindsets of urban youth and a good ear for their dialogue. As a Los Angeles resident, he’s seen up close the human impacts produced by homelessness, immigration, gentrification and political dealing and turned them into a suspenseful story.
See also Big Island, LA, by Boston Teran or The Last Days of Johnny Nunn by Nick Triplow.
Black Rose Writing
Print/Kindle
£13.30
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
