The Trade Mission
A Novel of Psychological Terror
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
On the heels of his acclaimed bestselling debut Lost Girls, Andrew Pyper brings his darkly musical language, chilling suspense, and psychological complexity to a story of survival in the Amazon jungle.
On the delirious eve of the new millennium, Marcus Wallace and Jonathon Bates, two twenty-four-year-old overnight dot-com millionaires, are on a trade mission in Brazil. Their product is Hypothesys, a virtual "morality machine" that promises to help people "make the best decisions of their lives." But when the decision is made to take an ecotour up the Río Negro deep into the Amazon jungle, the Hypothesys team members are forced to make choices for themselves -- choices that carry fatal consequences.
In the dead of night, their boat is boarded by paramilitaries who kill the Brazilian crew and kidnap Wallace and Bates, their two older colleagues, and their enigmatic interpreter, Crossman. Blindfolded and thrown into a pit for a prison, they must fight to find the will to survive. But when the increasingly unstable Wallace engineers a violent escape, their own natures emerge as a threat potentially more dangerous than the boundless jungle that surrounds them, or the gunmen who relentlessly pursue them.
A rare combination of literary skill, contemporary insight, and outstanding storytelling, The Trade Mission is an electrifying read that confirms Andrew Pyper's mastery of psychological suspense.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The ad copy on the back of the proofs for Pyper's second novel (after Lost Girls) points out just what's right, and what's wrong, with the book: "The Trade Mission is a gripping, ingeniously plotted thriller with an underlying literary interest in social criticism...." The novel does grip, and while its plot two young North American software entrepreneurs and their colleagues visiting Brazil are kidnapped by extortionists in the jungle, then escape for a chase isn't quite ingenious, it's clever enough; so far so good. The problem is the "underlying literary interest in social criticism." One supposes the copywriter mentioned "literary" as a pointer to Pyper's prose, which is lush and suffused with psychological insight, but which too often draws attention to itself at the expense of the story. The "social criticism" is relayed through character studies the kidnapped are extremely complex creations, as is their Canadian translator, a woman rapidly approaching middle age, who narrates; her probings into the differences rendered by wealth, class and age among the kidnapped, and between them and their captors, are perceptive and fresh. The novel takes a serious wrong turn, though, when the kidnapped are harbored by a tribe of Yanomami Indians. While giving the narrator plenty of chance to comment on the degradation of the rain forest and its peoples by industrial interests, this turn feels contrived; it leads to the kidnapped ingesting a native hallucinogen, which exacerbates the murkiness of the narrator's perceptions and results in a storytelling muddle that Pyper straightens out only through further contrivances. Pyper is a talented stylist and a masterful psychological portraitist, but his new novel is a slog.
