Desmond Bagley · 1975 · survival

Desmond Bagley's 1975 novel. A gold-mining town in the New Zealand mountains is destroyed by an avalanche that kills more than fifty people, and the book is built as the commission of inquiry that follows - the warnings ignored, the trees felled off the slope above, and the question of which of the survivors is actually to blame.

1. 1
   Auckland

   The commission of inquiry sits in the north, taking evidence from survivors, mining men and scientists - and the story of what happened at Hukahoronui is assembled backwards out of testimony that nobody gives honestly.

2. 2
   Christchurch

   Ian Ballard comes south to run the family company's mine, into a valley where his own name is remembered badly and where the men on the ground have been cutting the timber off the slope above the town for years.

3. 3
   Hukahoronui

   The snow builds on a bare mountainside above the houses, the warnings are dismissed as outsider nonsense, and when the slope finally goes it takes the town in seconds - and the rescue is dug out by hand in the dark.