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Book Reviewed by:When a high-security prison fails, a down-on-his luck cop and the governor's daughter are going to have to team up if they're going to escape in this "jaw-dropping, authentic, and absolutely gripping" (Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author) debut thriller from Adam Plantinga, whose first nonfiction book Lee Child praised as "truly excellent."
Kurt Argento, an ex-Detroit street cop who can't let injustice go—and who has the fighting skills to back up his idealism.
If he sees a young girl being dragged into an alley, he's going to rescue her and cause some damage.
When he does just that in a small corrupt Missouri town, he's brutally beaten and thrown into a maximum-security prison.
Julie Wakefield, a grad student who happens to be the governor's daughter, is about to take a tour of the prison. But when a malfunction in the security system releases a horde of prisoners, a fierce struggle for survival ensues.
Argento must help a small band of staff and civilians, including Julie and her two state trooper handlers, make their way from the bottom floor to the roof to safety.
All that stands in their way are six floors of the most dangerous convicts in Missouri.
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...continued
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(Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski).
In The Ascent, Adam Plantinga imagines what it would be like to climb through six levels of a prison in utter chaos: cell doors opening, guards hiding or dead, inmates murdering each other and so much worse. It does not require fiction, however, to imagine these hellscapes: history has many examples of such mayhem. Below are two of America's deadliest prison uprisings.
Attica, 1971
One of the most famous occurred over five days in September 1971 at the Attica State Correctional Facility in upstate New York. The prison's chronic overcrowding and abysmal living conditions (e.g., once-a-week showers and one roll of toilet paper per prisoner per month, among other indignities) erupted into violence on September 9 when inmates ...
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If you liked The Ascent, try these:
by Shane Bauer
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A ground-breaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in America: in one Louisiana prison and over the course of our country's history.
by Curtis Dawkins
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In this stunning debut collection, Curtis Dawkins, an MFA graduate and convicted murderer serving life without parole, takes us inside the worlds of prison and prisoners with stories that dazzle with their humor and insight, even as they describe a harsh and barren existence.
Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author of I Will Find You
The Ascent is jaw-dropping, authentic, and absolutely gripping.
