Review: "The Mine" by Daniel R. Cobb

The themes are all too common.  Greed. Corruption. The evils and indifference of capitalism.  The zealousness and righteousness of environmentalists.  But they are common because they make for a good story, and one that we all love to read.  And so it is with Daniel R. Cobb’s debut novel The Mine.

The Mine follows the story of Ryan, an eager underling at the Oregon DEQ charged with examining the applications for an expansion of a gold mine in Northeast Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains.  The gold mine is at the center of an extremely heated debate (CNN camera crews and all) between those that tout the jobs it brings to a destitute area, and those that point to the environmental destruction left in its wake.  After reviewing the expansion proposals, Ryan concludes that the request should be denied based on a myriad of alarming environmental concerns.  Unfortunately the final decision is not up to him, and this is where the story turns.

Ryan finds his boss, and the closest thing he has to a father, shot dead in the mans garage.  Shortly after this the gold mines expansion request is granted, furthering Ryan’s state of despondence, and lurching him on a course that will put his life and that of his beloved wife Meagan at risk.  This frenzy carries the rest of the story through the twist and turns that come from Ryan’s valiant if reckless pursuit to right the wrongs he sees in the world.

For a debut novel, and a self-published one at that, I was pleasantly surprised at Cobb’s ability to navigate the reader through the many turns The Mine takes.  It felt like it took him about the same time it took me to settle into this fast-paced thriller, and it was rewarding to watch the author and the story mature before my eyes. The only minor complaint, and it could be a potential deal breaker for the more grammatically obsessed among us, was the fact that it could have used a thorough editing to smooth out some dialogue and punctuation issues, as well as the removal of a few lengthy passages that led to an unnecessary total of 360 pages.  But overall, this didn’t detract from what proved to be an engaging and topically relevant story, and one that I would recommend without hesitation.

Update: A new edition of The Mine has been released, and should address some of the aforementioned editing issues.

Daniel R. Cobb will read from The Mine this Wednesday (3-10) at 7:30pm at Annie Bloom’s Books.