The Canal is not wide enough for the giant container ships now shuttling back and forth to China, and (in reality as well as the fiction) a Chinese firm has been planning a joint new canal with Nicaragua which would be larger and would take much trade from Panama. If Panama expanded its link that would perhaps scupper the opposing plans, so I can see the validity of the move. Author Christoph Martin who has lived in Panama, explains that each ship's passage costs two hundred thousand dollars, cash down, providing the small country of Panama with two billion dollars a year. That's quite enough money to lure all kinds of dodgy dealers.

Naturally, the American Embassy is highly interested in anything concerning the canal. Especially the staff hopes an American firm will win the construction bid for expansion. Max Burns, answering his friend Godfredo Roco's request to join a local Panamanian bidding team as a geoengineer, arrives from grey England to a lush tropical paradise. Not long passes before he realises he's out of his depth. Dr. Alexandra Wong, a hydrologist on his team, isn't impressed by the parties with bikini-clad girls that occur regularly. The local ecologists want to preserve the wetlands and their natural freshwater from canal locks, so any proposal has to take nature into account, and then there are paleontologists awaiting excavations; an admirable level of detail is shown.

I was interested in the way the bidding process is described, and the double-dealing, industrial espionage, CIA involvement and violence that Swiss author Christoph Martin imagines might go on behind the scenes. His adventure is based on his life in Switzerland and in Panama, where he worked as a lawyer for a decade. Men and women with a lot to gain and everything to lose populate his increasingly dark novel THE EXPANSION. I recommend the read to any thriller fan who wants the real background behind the stories that make the headlines. This is an adult read with strong language but less violence than a James Bond film.