Landslide

In a sense, Bob Boyd was born at the age of 23 — the day a terrible car crush completely erased all memory of his previous life. Recovery had been a slow grim struggle and in the years since Boyd, following the advice of the hospital psychiatrist, had successfully suppressed all curiosity about the man he once was. Until, in a small timber town in British Columbia he is jolted by a name — Trinavant. Sluggishly, echoes from the dead past strike a disturbing chord. Boyd begins to make enquiries and in so doing disturbs a deadly hornet’s nest. The powerful Matterson family, for whom he is doing a land survey as part of a dam-building project, have spent years obliterating all memory of the Trinavant name. They will certainly not tolerate the determined probing of one footloose geologist — as Boyd discovers when he becomes the quarry in a murderous manhunt. Not are the Mattersons in any mood to listen to Boyd’s expert warnings of impending disaster, for the almost completed dam is built on an unstable geological strata and the whole community is threatened. This tremendously tense drama of one man’s battle against unscrupulous local interests and Boyd’s search for his lost identity is Desmond Bagley’s most trilling novel yet, its impressive magnitude matched only by the rugged grandeur of the wild Canadian background.