Book Description

Copper Canyon is both upmarket commercial fiction and a suspenseful literary legal thriller that will engage readers in questioning the proper balance between too little and too much government regulation and the role of law and morality in the battle between good and evil in determining the fate and fortunes of individuals and business enterprises. Taking readers on a page-turning journey into a strange new world, the novel introduces them to the fascinating realm of underground miners operating massive mining machines as they navigate dark excavations, sometimes as extensive as the street-scape of Manhattan Island but thousands of feet beneath the surface, where they work in constant peril of fires, floods, explosions, and cave-ins, not to mention Black Lung disease from inhaling coal dust. Copper Canyon tells a good, fresh story, worthy of investigative journalism, about a mine explosion that never should have happened; but the Mine's owners and its brotherhood of coal miners were no match for a government safety inspector with a personal agenda and a coal miner out for revenge. After a gripping courtroom drama of a hearing in which the government ought to have protected them, the miners were placed in real jeopardy by the very laws meant to protect their safety, proving once again that well-intended laws written in Washington, D.C. can put lives and livelihoods in the wrong hands. But the little town of Heavenly faced still darker threats and its fate depended on a lawyer and a creative young mine foreman willing to seek justice against all odds. Can they rescue the Mine and bring hope for the future?The novel speaks with compelling authenticity born of the author's decades of experience as a lawyer representing coal miners before, during, and after mine accidents.