The Vaults

This is a haunting winner

By 1935 in the City, archivist Arthur Puskis has worked in the Vaults for thirty plus years. The underground cavernous facility has stored the records of criminals for over seven decades and Parks is the expert at what is inside though he admits he knows a small percentage of the numerous files.

Recently, Arthur has found evidence of the Navaho Project in which two files with the same identifier contain different profiles, but share in common convicted killers never spending time in jail; this shakes his belief system that the Vaults are sacred. At the same time weed addicted investigative reporter Frank Frings and blackmailing private investigator Ethan Poole independently find similar information on the alleged The Navajo Project. Mayor Red Henry and his goons will go any length to keep the findings from going public, but someone is also targeting him and his cohorts with bombing assassinations.

Readers will want to enter Toby Ball's The Vaults as the vivid description of political corruption controlling the City hooks the audience to learn what the Navaho Project is and how far the Mayor and his supporters will go in exchange for graft. The story line is fast-paced with three unlikely heroes risking their lives trying to expose what they have learned. This is a haunting winner.

Harriet Klausner

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

On The Town

Much as Loren Estleman's did in his novel, "Gas City," Toby Ball creates a town of his own and populates it with multiple bad guys taking power over the good people. Corruption pervades, and it is but a few citizens who fight back. A couple of labor activists, a private dick, an investigative reporter. Finally, there is the keeper of the records- all of the history of the city's courts. Each is motivated in his or her own way to find an alternate way for life in the dark city. Women are medicated in asylums as their children are kept from them in orphanages, starving and uneducated. You have to go through some pretty dark times in Ball's carefully constructed novel, such carefulness apparently not noticing the huge proofreading error on the very last page. When the novel finally ends, it is as the sun finally shines, and not a moment too soon.

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