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[Following is a volunteer review of "The Expansion" by Christoph Martin.]

The Expansion is a geopolitical thriller based around a bid for, and the subsequent building of, an expansion to the Panama Canal. Max Burns, the protagonist of the novel, is the lead engineer of a British team bidding for the rights to build the project. Working with his old school friend Godfredo and Godfredo’s shady father Paco, Max and his team have to deal with the equatorial climate, Godfredo’s laissez-faire attitude and corruption from local officials at every turn.

Though Max’s former girlfriend Sarah broke up with him when he elected to take the job of a lifetime working on the expansion bid in Panama, a new love interest for Max enters the picture in the form of Karis Deen, an American paleo-archaeologist working in the Canal Zone. Karis’ involvement runs deeper than Max knows, however, as she is an undercover CIA agent with a mission to make sure the canal expansion is not sabotaged.

Max is a typical engineer; exceptional at his job and driven to succeed, sabotage and graft are incomprehensible to him. Unfortunately for him, this means that those with more nefarious motives see him as a useful fall guy, and it slowly becomes obvious throughout the book that Max is nothing more than a pawn in a game worth billions of dollars. A murder late in the book raises the stakes to terrifying levels and Max has to decide who to trust as he fights to save both himself and the project from disaster.

I didn’t find a single typo in the book and the word choices are appropriate for the genre - bad language and violence are to be expected on a construction site, after all! Pacing and sentence structure are excellent and the flow of the story is never interrupted by clunky exposition or unnecessary scenes. The author is to be congratulated for the quality of editing on these points.

I enjoyed The Expansion, but I thought that the book had some shortcomings. It was very light on engineering detail; while the history of the canal and the current economic and political climate was nicely filled in, there were no specifics on what the canal’s expansion would actually entail. Would there be new locks or extensions to original ones? Would the canal have to be closed at any point? Is the canal being deepened? These questions were not answered at all, and I found myself disappointed by this lack of detail.

The only characters who are really described in any detail are Max and Godfredo, and for them we only get character descriptions, not physical ones, which were reserved for the female characters in the book. I found it very hard to imagine what Max, in particular, looked like; describing him through Karis’ eyes would have been quite simple to do and it would have really helped the reader visualize the events of the book a lot better.

Ultimately, I felt that the pace of the book was too slow for a thriller, particularly quite a short one. The single murder in the book occurs very late on and until this point, there is very little ‘action’ happening. I would recommend it to anyone interested in learning about the geopolitics of Central America and the history of the Panama Canal, but I regret to say that as a geopolitical thriller, it’s not really all that thrilling. I am rating The Expansion three out of four stars.

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The Expansion
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A good and informative review. I was hoping they'd be more action going on. I'm yet to make the decision to read this one yet.

It's sexist to just provide physical descriptions of the women, not of the men. Just kidding :)

Izesicle wrote:It's sexist to just provide physical descriptions of the women, not of the men. Just kidding

What it does is make it very obvious that the book is written from a male point of view. Men don't think to describe other men, but they do tend to lovingly describe women. In my experience, female writers consider both - they are more likely to add very minute descriptions of hair, makeup, clothes etc too!

The review is very good. I enjoyed reading it ?

I actually read in a blog about this book that the author Christoph Martin is the result of a collaboration of two writers, one female one male!

wow!nice review. I agree with your review. it's hard to trust when the situation is critical. But one thing for sure...

Proverbs 3:5-6New International Version (NIV)
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight.

Very good review. The constructive criticism was on point. Especially when it comes to only the female characters being described I fully agree that it can be something easily overlooked since written from a male perspective (as you addressed in another comment). It probably feels pretty odd for men to have to describe men. However, people do tend to evaluate themselves. Especially when contemplating love interests and how they might view them. So I feel it could have been worked in somehow. I do agree that without sufficient description it can be harder to picture, and then harder to follow sometimes. I relate there. I am a very visual person.

Nice review, touched on the key ingredients of a good read - pacing, structure and flow. A shame it didn't meet your expectations or criteria cut-off to read as a proper thriller. As they say half bread is better than none, so Central American geopolitics and the history of the Panama canal will have to do.

The expansion
I thought it was historical fiction, which I typically avoid because they're usually long and slow paced. If this is supposed to be a thriller, then the disappointment on the slow pace would be much more.