Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2010
320 pages
Genre: Mysteries
Publication Information
In a dystopian 1930s America, a chilling series of events leads three men down a path to uncover their city's darkest secret.
At the height of the most corrupt administration in the City's history, a mysterious duplicate file is discovered deep within the Vaults - a cavernous hall containing all of the municipal criminal justice records of the last seventy years. From here, the story follows: Arthur Puskis, the Vault's sole, hermit-like archivist with an almost mystical faith in a system to which he has devoted his life; Frank Frings, a high-profile investigative journalist with a self-medicating reefer habit; and Ethan Poole, a socialist private eye with a penchant for blackmail.
All three men will undertake their own investigations into the dark past and uncertain future of the City - calling into question whether their most basic beliefs can be maintained in a climate of overwhelming corruption and conspiracy
"Ball's 'City,' in which despair and graft are almost palpable, is an imaginative achievement on a par with Loren Estleman's Gas City." - Publishers Weekly
"If George Orwell and Dashiell Hammett have ever decided to collaborate on a book, they might have come up with something like The Vaults. A wonderful debut from a writer to watch." - Michael Harvey, author of The Chicago Way
This information about The Vaults was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Toby Ball works at the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. The Vaults is his first novel.
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