A heartfelt but hard-hitting, deeply characterized, thriller about the contemporary Oil Economy and what it might take to change global dependence on oil production marries with very human stories of a Native American former football star and his tribe. As pride go before a fall, so does greed beget more greed, and the status quo propagates itself. Hair-raising and heartwrenching, ASCENDING POWER is a memorable thriller.

I'm not sure where to start here... while I applaud the author for having the perseverance and tenacity to write a book and have it published I struggled to finish reading this one. It just wasn't a good fit for me.

Disgraced celebrity athlete Billy Strikeleather reluctantly returns home, at his uncle's request, and is almost immediately embroiled in an ambitious plot involving miracle fuel additives, crooked politicians, Big-Oil, backroom bargains, long-held secrets, and a few other odds and ends. I don't mean to sound dismissive but there's a lot of stuff going on.

In the very beginning of the book Strikeleather's uncle is seriously injured by an unknown gunman, Strikeleather witnesses the whole thing, then it all just kind of goes on the backburner... No investigation, no real effort to find the shooter, it mostly just serves as a way to throw Billy into things. Something like what Alfred Hitchcock used to call a MacGuffin (although in this case a fairly extreme one).

The main problem, for me at any rate, is that there are big chunks of the book - even significant plot twists - that seem rushed and forced while other parts that aren't terribly relevant or even relevant at all (a character's posture, furniture placement, the way a cigar is lighted and smoked) are related in near excruciating detail.

Add in some complex technical passages, a few plot twists that would not be out of place in a TV soap opera, characters that never really come to life and a story that doesn't quite draw the reader in... and you have a narrative pace that doesn't allow for any real kind of suspense.

Unfortunately Ascending Power doesn't work very well as a thriller.

***Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with a free digital copy of this title in exchange for an honest review.