BookBrowse Reviews The Ascent by Adam Plantinga

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An ex-cop wrongly imprisoned. A governor's daughter touring a high-security state penitentiary. An electronic security system meltdown. Welcome to hell, where the only way out is up.

Adam Plantinga's brilliant debut novel, The Ascent, introduces readers to former Detroit police officer Kurt Argento, whose grief-fueled drive to the Pacific Ocean runs head-on into trouble in rural Missouri…with shockingly bloody consequences.

Unmoored by the death of his wife, Argento loses control on the job and disobeys a superior in a situation that puts them both at risk. He is offered early retirement from the Detroit Police Department after twenty-one years of service. Knowing he is "a sinking ship…and when the ship is going down, you seal off the damaged compartment so the craft can stay afloat," he heads west in his truck with his Chow Shepherd, Hudson, turning his back on Detroit and all the places that remind him of Emily. In Rocker, Missouri, Argento stops at a local festival for an apple cider—but instead witnesses a man about to assault a young girl in an alley. Not on Argento's watch…once a cop, always a cop. He beats the man senseless, but it turns out the pedophile's brother is the crooked local sheriff, Rokus.

Along with a deputy, Rokus viciously assaults Argento, arrests him on false charges and sends him on the next transport to Whitehall Correctional Institute, "an example of entropy … where complex systems tend to split apart and get chaotic." Plantinga, a sergeant with the San Francisco Police Department, portrays dirty cops as convincingly as the good ones; the brief interactions between Rokus and Argento set up the latter's reverberating decision to give a false name upon being booked: he knows it is "one thing to thump a drifter" but quite another to beat up a former member of the DPD. If those who arrested him knew his true identity, "they'd probably consider suiciding him in his cell." Sure enough, when Rokus discovers his error, he makes a call to Whitehall and puts a price tag on Argento's head.

Argento's ordeal plays out in contrast to the story of Julie Wakefield, daughter of Missouri governor Christopher Wakefield. She is twenty-five, happily engaged but still searching for her professional direction, when she enters Whitehall on the Fourth of July weekend to complete a requirement for her college Corrections course. With her are two Missouri state troopers assigned to protect her: Derrick Coates, who's had a long association with the Wakefield family, and Maxwell Jamerson, a brash narcotics officer filling in on the holiday. These three, along with Argento, are in the building when the digital security systems in the antiquated prison malfunction—releasing some of the inmates who begin to rampage. Radios are down, cell phones cannot access a signal…it cannot get worse.

Yet, it does…and fast. The technical failure has triggered a security system reset; in two hours every cell door will open on each of Whitehall's six levels. Each floor is full of hardened criminals made more vicious by the decrepit state of their imprisonment: general population, violent felons, sex offenders, psychologically disturbed criminals, gang members and a death row housing an Armenian inmate who had done "things you wouldn't believe" to get there. The only way out is to escape the "cell net" around the facility and reach the roof to call for help. Now joined by Argento, the unlikely group of Julie, Coates, Jamerson and several rattled prison employees must work together to survive the daunting climb to the roof. The clock is ticking.

The Ascent stands out not just for its ingenious plot—a winning page-turning equation by itself—but for Argento, a complicated man whose fearlessness is merely the mask for his deep, inconsolable pain. Amid chaos, memories of the woman he loved "so fiercely it scared him" come unbidden. Plantinga creates a love story in retrospect that resonates with the reader and makes Argento's glib quips an obvious band-aid for his numbed existence without her. For this epic ascent out of hell and into the heavens, Plantinga channels Dante in Argento's quest for redemption and hope: for Julie, the others and ultimately, himself.

Plantinga's writing simply dazzles: his characters are delightfully idiosyncratic, the complications and twists cleverly disguised, the dialogue funny and cinema-ready and the violence uber-realistic and not for the faint of heart. The Ascent is the first must-read thriller of 2024, and this reader hopes to see Kurt Argento again soon.

This review first ran in the February 21, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.