Fire and Brimstone
The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- €3.99
Publisher Description
When billionaire's daughter Alison Wolff disappears following a massacre at a party, nobody knows if she has been kidnapped or killed. Dan Starkey is hired to find the missing student but instead is drawn into a violent struggle between rival gangs.
A drugs war is tearing the city apart and in response, a new church movement has sprung up. But when a controversial new abortion clinic is firebombed, Dan is asked to prove their involvement.
In a Belfast rapidly descending back into chaos, Dan is left with an impossible choice - betray his client or risk losing his family...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this compelling tale, Punke recounts the grim details of the worst hard-rock mining disaster in United States history. On June 8, 1917, a fire broke out in the main shaft of a huge complex of copper mines 2,000 feet beneath Granite Mountain in Butte, Mont. The fire raged for three days, killing 164 of the 400 or so men at work that day. Punke, a Washington, D.C., lawyer and novelist (The Revenant), takes the reader deep underground and into the heart of the calamity. If the horrifying account of the fire and the trapped men is the heart of this yarn, its soul is Punke's historical contextualization of the event. He paints a vivid picture of a city, state and nation in the grip of industrial monopolies. In Butte, copper was king and Standard Oil, in the guise of Anaconda Mining, owned most of the copper (though not the Granite Mountain mine). In Punke's telling, Standard Oil spent lavishly to control the municipal and state governments; they aggressively fought the miners' union. Immediately after the tragic fire, the workers violently vented their fury on the hated Anaconda. Like the hardworking miners he writes about, Punke gets the job done, with sturdy prose.
