Reading Time: 4 minutes
Chris Bauer’s Cobalt follows a geopolitical showdown as a billionaire, hacker, CIA, and FBI team up to protect a vital resource from foreign power. A book review by Azam, exclusively for Different Truths.
“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” — Flannery O’Connor
Chris Bauer’s latest thriller, Cobalt, upholds Philip Sidney’s advice for the poet to educate and instruct, a hallmark of Bauer’s plume. Don Swaim, former host of CBS Radio’s Book Beat, applauds: “Chris Bauer has become a master of the classic international thriller.”
The town’s time capsule triggers a maelstrom in a placid rural community. releasing forces of global magnitude.
The FBI and CIA solicit billionaire Max Fend and his well-connected hacker girlfriend, Renee LeFrancois, to confirm the suspected presence of a very large cobalt deposit in the Pocono mountains of rural Pennsylvania. The intrepid pair find themselves neck-deep in danger, pitted against a foreign conspiracy for primacy over the metal that powers lithium-ion batteries. The action builds up. adversaries close in, and deadly characters of lethal intent are unleashed. Among them were one of the Georgian Professors, clandestine proxies for the Chinese government, and Bibi Momina Qureshi, a rogue Pakistani female fighter pilot turned freelance assassin.
The local community finds itself in the crossfire of the high-stakes frenzy to gain control of the Poconos’ mineral wealth. A single mom seeks to reset her identity, an old disappearance threatens to resurface as something else, and Town Watch vigilantes enter the fray.
Secrets unravel and danger mounts as Max and Renee put their lives on the line to secure a community and their nation against foreign intrigue.
And the principal tenant of the White House is a native American lady.
As the back cover blurb succinctly states, “In Cobalt, the quest for power and control collide with the will to protect, resulting in a thrilling, explosive showdown.”
Through the deadly quest for cobalt, this thought-provoking thriller enthralls, while juxtaposing the polarities of power: pure greed and unscrupulousness versus the conscientious will to serve and protect.
Billionaire Max Fend is the other pole of power: heir to an inherited fortune he has stewarded and discreetly put at the disposal of the public interest without compromising profits. Hacker Renee LeFrancois is a well-connected former Canadian Security Intelligence Service officer (CSIS).
This time, they are in a race to snip China’s tentacles, probing the American heartland to hijack the exploitation rights of a major cobalt discovery in Pennsylvania’s abandoned Poconos coalfields. Their association with and backing by the CIA and FBI serves as an oblique and perhaps unintended reminder that outgoing US President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex in his 1961 Farewell Address might not be an absolute.
After all, stereotypes often hide a surprising reality that squirms to extricate itself from predetermined ideological pigeonholes.
Cobalt throbs with suspense, crime, politics, big business, government, foreign intrigue, geopolitics, and conspiracy disrupting the lives of good, honest folk.
Myrna is a native American single mom living in a trailer on her twenty acres. Wyatt, her 12-year-old son, finds a piece of cobalt on their property. which triggers events converging on a looming holocaust that could trigger World War III, in a misguided act designed not to wrest America’s cobalt but to deny America the benefits of its own resources and ensure China’s dominant position in lithium-ion batteries.
China’s insatiable appetite for cobalt is crucial for its $1.4 trillion car industry, which holds 32% of world production. It accounts for 10% of its GDP. the growth of which proportionally feeds its neo-colonialist policies, claiming self-defined ‘lost territories,’ on flimsy historical tidbits, such as the 15th century port calls of Fleet Admiral Zhen He, the court eunuch.
Cobalt shows the reach of China’s tentacles as far afield as its cobalt monopoly in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to Greenland, where it splatters pristine vistas with human and canine blood, and then deep into Pennsylvania’s Poconos.
Yet, however sleepy Mr. Trump might think President Joseph Biden might be, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is wide awake, as an MIT News report of January 18, 2024, informs!
“MIT researchers have now designed a battery material that could offer a more sustainable way to power electric cars. The new lithium-ion battery includes a cathode based on organic materials instead of cobalt or nickel (another metal often used in lithium-ion batteries).
“In a new study, the researchers showed that this material, which could be produced at much lower cost than cobalt-containing batteries, can conduct electricity at similar rates as cobalt batteries. The new battery also has comparable storage capacity and can be charged up faster than cobalt batteries, the researchers report.”
If China’s next tentacle slithers in for the MIT formula, Max Fend and Renée will surely be waiting!
The plotting of Rick Bauer’s Cobalt is an intricate spider’s web of meticulous cunning, bringing in, controlling, and coordinating disparate and conflicting elements. Yet, the tidy prose keeps it reader-friendly, and the story’s level of anticipation ensures exciting navigation, and the characters just take over. Let them. The sub-plot of chemistry between Myrna and Max titillates with impending possibilities, but loyalty and decency see their day, and the endangered moral order stays intact.
After the spectacular success of seven stand-alone and co-authored thrillers, Chris Bauer now singlehandedly wields the Max Fend series in Cobalt. his eighth book.
Jane’s Baby, Chris Bauer’s debut novel, was a prophetic conspiracy thriller. warning in 2018 of the impending threat to the US Supreme Court’s 1973 abortion ruling, Roe versus Wade. As feared, four years later, in 2022, it was indeed overturned.
Chris Bauer’s official biography introduces him as a native Philadelphian. with “lengthy stops as an adult” in Michigan and Connecticut. He takes pride in his Philadelphian background of “street sports on blacktop, fistfights, brick and stone row houses, and twelve years of well-intentioned Catholic school discipline.”
As CG Bauer, he’s also the author of Scars on the Face of God, an Epic Awards runner-up. He is a member of the International Thriller Writers and the Horror Writers Association.
His favourite quote is paraphrased on his website from Steve Shilstone’s Chance: “The thing I write will be the thing I write.”
And that’s just what he does!
Picture design by Anumita Roy
