Overview

On Christmas Day in 1893, every man, woman and child in a remote gold mining town disappeared, belongings forsaken, meals left to freeze in vacant cabins; and not a single bone was ever found. One hundred and thirteen years later, two backcountry guides are hired by a history professor and his journalist daughter to lead them into the abandoned mining town so that they can learn what happened. With them is a psychic, and a paranormal photographer - as the town is rumoured to be haunted. A party that tried to explore the town years ago was never heard from again. What this crew is about to discover is that twenty miles from civilization, with a blizzard bearing down, they are not alone, and the past is very much alive.

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9780312537401

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On Christmas Day 1893, the tiny, remote gold-mining town of Abandon, Colorado, ceased to be. No trace of the population was ever found. More than a century later, a historian, a journalist, and two paranormal investigators trek into the ghost town with varying purposes. Crouch tells his tale in alternating chapters, but the reader ultimately learns that the story of both the residents and the latter-day visitors is one of gold, greed, and murder--and a pinch of madness. Abandon is an ambitious and largely effective suspense novel. The portrayal of life in Abandon is rich with details of brutal hardship, suffering, and a gnawing sense of creepiness. The modern investigators are tried by cold, a blizzard, avalanche dangers, rotted buildings that may collapse at any moment, and the eeriness of the derelict town. But Crouch has two sets of characters, and nearly all have a backstory. Some work; some are strained. Even so, the palpable suspense just keeps building, and many thriller fans--especially those who like a touch of horror--will lose sleep to find out how it all ends. - Booklist

Whether it's 1893 or 2009, the town of Abandon, Colo., is a very nasty place to be. When a novel opens with a little girl blowing away a mule skinner with a revolver, readers can safely expect more dirty work to come. And they get it in spades from Crouch (Locked Doors, 2005, etc.), who sets up two alternating, equally unsavory plotlines. In 2009, historian Lawrence Kendall takes along his journalist daughter Abigail Foster on an expedition to the Colorado ghost town whose inhabitants all vanished without a trace in December 1893. In those days, we see in the second narrative, Abandon is in decline, the nearby mine tapped out, though there are still plenty of prostitutes and gunslingers around - and local bigwig Bart Packer has 91 gold bars he found next to a headless Spanish skeleton stashed away in his fancy house. That conquistador gold will cause no end of trouble, as 19th-century desperados kill Packer and hide the gold in the mine, and 21st-century Iraq veterans brutalize Lawrence's party in an effort to make the historian tell them where the gold is located. People are shot at point-blank range, knives are brandished, gruesome wounds inflicted, and it all gets fairly ridiculous after a while. One or two gotchas will make you jump: the bad guy you thought was dead who comes from behind with a dagger; the sheriff you thought would help who turns out to be one of Them. When a crazy preacher locking the entire Abandon population in the mine to starve is followed by the story of the woman whose husband cut out her tongue with a razor, or a post-traumatic, stressed-out Iraq veteran gets shot as he threatens for the umpteenth time to carve up Abigail in unspeakable ways, readers are likely to stop flinching and start laughing. Definitely not for the squeamish - or skeptical. (Kirkus Reviews)

On Christmas Day 1893, the tiny, remote gold-mining town of Abandon, Colorado, ceased to be. No trace of the population was ever found. More than a century later, a historian, a journalist, and two paranormal investigators trek into the ghost town with varying purposes. Crouch tells his tale in alternating chapters, but the reader ultimately learns that the story of both the residents and the latter-day visitors is one of gold, greed, and murder—and a pinch of madness. Abandon is an ambitious and largely effective suspense novel. The portrayal of life in Abandon is rich with details of brutal hardship, suffering, and a gnawing sense of creepiness. The modern investigators are tried by cold, a blizzard, avalanche dangers, rotted buildings that may collapse at any moment, and the eeriness of the derelict town. But Crouch has two sets of characters, and nearly all have a backstory. Some work; some are strained. Even so, the palpable suspense just keeps building, and many thrille

Author Information

BLAKE CROUCH grew up in North Carolina and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He and his family currently reside in Colorado.

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