The Rig (Signet)

From Publisher's Weekly: "Collee strikes black gold with this taut drama. The exotic Madagascar setting shimmers realistically, the oil rig looms as a menacing behemoth, and even the minor characters achieve major status as the reader is never sure whom to believe right up to the perfect ending."

"Sophisticated thriller that hops back and forth from the untouristed tropics to the steppes of Alberta to great effect" - Kirkus reviews.


Times are hard in Madagascar. Many people had pinned their hopes on the discovery of oil; but there is not oil, and in a tragic finale to the futile exploration, a plane crash kills the departing foreign drillers.
In Canada, Spence, an injured rig worker, is offered the job of taking an inventory of the Madagascan rig. He accepts reluctantly, realizing that only his work can save him from the battle. But in the dusty, decrepit environment of French East Africa, his seemingly simple task becomes increasingly complex. Slowly he discovers the paranoid notion that the air crash was no accident.
Like John Collee's previous two novels, The Rig is a page-turning thriller laced with accute observations and memorable characters - the driven, almost crippled Spence, the beautiful, half-french, half-African Perpetude Peyrame, the drunken polygamist Morgan Hanssen, the casual murderer Elgin Kirk, Mitchell the lonely missionary, and Velo-André, the poignantly optimistic 'Ministre des Ressources Minérales' - all fallible people blown like sand into the grinding wheels of international power.

Times are hard in Madagascar. Many people had pinned their hopes on the discovery of oil; but there is not oil, and in a tragic finale to the futile exploration, a plane crash kills the departing foreign drillers. In Canada, Spence, an injured rig worker, is offered the job of taking an inventory of the Madagascan rig. He accepts reluctantly, realizing that only his work can save him from the battle. But in the dusty, decrepit environment of French East Africa, his seemingly simple task becomes increasingly complex. Slowly he discovers the paranoid notion that the air crash was no accident. Like John Collee's previous two novels, The Rig is a page-turning thriller laced with accute observations and memorable characters - the driven, almost crippled Spence, the beautiful, half-french, half-African Perpetude Peyrame, the drunken polygamist Morgan Hanssen, the casual murderer Elgin Kirk, Mitchell the lonely missionary, and Velo-André, the poignantly optimistic 'Ministre des Ressources Minérales' - all fallible people blown like sand into the grinding wheels of international power.