Attempts to deliver messages on a variety of social and environmental issues have ruined many a crime novel, but Hall mixes his ingredients flawlessly…” — Bill Ott, Booklist
Overview
From James W. Hall, the highly acclaimed best-selling author of Hard Aground, Mean High Tide, and Bones Of Coral, comes a stunning and superbly rendered new thriller in which the most deadly animals in the jungle are the ones that kill for money. With one poacher’s bullet, a young woman’s life is tragically, brutally taken–and her mother’s is shattered forever. Thus begins Gone Wild, James W. Hall’s electrifying new novel, which penetrates the lush, sultry jungles of Africa and Malaysia to explore the mercenary slaughter of animals-and to expose the savagery and humanity in us all.
Gone Wild brings back Thorn, the haunting, quixotic hero last seen in the best-seller Mean High Tide. (Though he plays only a minor role.) And in a novel filled with the author’s signatures exotic locales, vise-tightening suspense, steamy sexuality, hypnotic prose–Hall introduces a bold new element: one of the toughest, most complex female characters in modern fiction. Allison Farleigh’s desperate struggle to save the endangered orangutans from poachers–and to uncover the truth about her daughter’s murder–give the novel its passion and its fire. And the shocking international conspiracy she exposes in the process gives Gone Wild its relentless, heart-pounding tension. A mesmerizing journey into the heart of darkness, Gone Wild is one of those rare thrillers that not only makes you sweat–it makes you think.
Praise
Prowling from the crime-ridden south Florida killing fields to the steamy jungles of Malaysia, Hall’s latest novel finds Thorn, the moody hero of several previous yarns (Mean High Tide, etc.), entangled in the crusades of childhood friend Allison Farleigh, founder of the Wildlife Protection League, a worldwide organization dedicated to saving exotic endangered animals. When Allison’s eldest daughter is shot dead while accompanying her mother and younger sister on the annual orangutan census in the wilds of Borneo, Thorn gets embroiled in the case, which eventually pits him against a sociopathic pair of twins engaged in the brokering of rare animals to zoological collectors-and, lurking behind them, a rich and powerful collector whose designs bring the action to Brunei for a brutally satisfying denouement.
Hall’s fans may be surprised to find that Thorn plays second fiddle here to Allison, but they won’t be disappointed with this charismatically courageous woman or her adventures.
With its far-flung locales and unexpected heroine, this is Hall’s most ambitious novel yet, a work of considerable moral depth distinguished by rich characterizations, live-wire prose and bolts of offbeat humor. —Publishers Weekly
Read The Whole Thorn Series
My editor said she loved the story, but wanted me to rewrite it a little and find a way to put Thorn into the novel. So I turned a character from the original manuscript into Thorn. That’s why he never really lived up to his usual heroic standards. So it’s technically a Thorn novel but not really.
James on Writing Gone Wild
A couple of lucky accidents pushed me in the direction of this novel. The first one was the accidental meeting with a very interesting US Fish and Wildlife Officer who worked out of the Naples office. I’d met him while doing research for Mean High Tide, which is partially set in the Naples area. He was a fan of my novels and after answering some research questions I had about fish farming, he said he had a subject I might be interested in for a future novel. Lots of people approach me with ideas for novels and I almost never find them of much use. Other peoples’ ideas and passions are rarely my own. But in this case, it was different. The Wildlife officer suggested I should consider writing about animal smuggling.
For a while as I researched Gone Wild, I was focusing on the smuggling of endangered snakes. But I found that it was beyond my powers to make snakes either interesting or endearing in any way. As I sought another animal to focus on, my sister in law gave me an issue of a local newspaper with an investigative article in it about the smuggling of primates. I was immediately fascinated. I sensed that apes would be far interesting to write about than snakes. Eventually my research led me to orangutans and after encountering several people in Miami who worked with orangutans, I decided that it would be important to the novel for me to go to Borneo to see orangutans in their natural jungle setting.
It was a great trip. I met all kinds of colorful and interesting people on both sides of the animal smuggling issue and I tried to bring this more international feel into the book. When the book was done, my editor said she loved what I’d done, but she wanted me to find a way to put Thorn into the novel. I was reluctant, but I did it finally. I turned a character from the original manuscript named Chip into Thorn. For this reason Thorn really never lived up to his usual heroic standards in Gone Wild. He wasn’t the protagonist of the book and only played a fairly minor role in the outcome of the plot.
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We check in with Thorn over at Snappers or Lorelei every once in a while. Maybe he’ll have some new stories to tell us.
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