Gone to Ground by Morgan Hatch
“Gone to Ground is outlandish, 80 percent true and ripped from the headlines. Not sure which parts make up the 20 percent.”
That’s the description from author Morgan Hatch of his new suspense thriller, Gone to Ground — a twisty tale about two brothers, one on his way to college and another one mixing with the wrong crowd, along with a devious businessman willing to do anything — including murder in order to make himself rich.
The best part of this book is the strained, but still ultimately loving, relationship between the two very different brothers that drives Hatch’s whole story.
High Hopes and High Stakes
First-generation immigrant Javier Jimenez has a bright future ahead of him as he hopes to be a student at a place like UCLA after graduation from his neighborhood high school. But he’s very concerned about his younger brother Alex, who’s fallen in with drug dealers and criminals on the streets. The more Javier tries to reach out and help Alex, the more the younger boy angrily pushes him away — with the two eventually coming to physical blows over their opposite life paths.
Despite efforts by their mother to make peace between the feuding brothers, the tension between them continues to escalate dramatically until Alex first finds himself in trouble with the police over a weapons charge — and then is later shot and wounded during a botched robbery attempt.
But, even as Javier tries desperately to stop his brother from throwing his life away, he faces an even more frightening threat from an unexpected source – a powerful hedge fund fixer named George Jones who wants to destroy the Jimenez family’s neighborhood and then rebuild it in a way to make himself a huge profit.
Love Versus Greed
The Jones character — as we soon see — is a truly despicable man who will do anything to achieve his grandiose real estate and money ambitions. “Some people flip houses, I flip zip codes,” he boasts to Javier.
Suddenly people are dying or mysteriously disappearing as Jones puts his ruthless plans into action. When one of these victims is someone very close to Javier, he decides he must do whatever it takes to stop Jones in order to save his own family as well as his community from this man.
Will Javier succeed and eventually reach his own goal of making it out of the neighborhood to attend UCLA and start a new life?
Will he be able to help his brother Alex escape a life of crime and get back on the straight and narrow?
And will ruthless, powerful and bullying hedge fun fixer George Jones — one of the most evil characters you’ll ever find in a book — finally be punished for the lives he’s taken and all the damage that he’s caused?
The answers are all in the ending for Gone To Ground where we find out if good — Javier Jimenez’s love for his brother, his family and his community — can indeed triumph over powerful forces of greed and corruption.
To find out more information about Gone to Ground and purchase the book, check out Morgan Hatch’s website here.
Having taught for almost 30 years in the Los Angeles public schools, Morgan Hatch now writes about some of the people and places he’s come to know. Residents of Los Angeles, particularly the Valley, will recognize many of the landmarks, though considerable liberties have been taken with the details.
Most of the narrative of Gone To Ground was pulled from the headlines, sometimes with uncanny overlap. Corruption, engineered gentrification, and even bullet train rerouting were page 1 articles in the LA Times during the time at which the novel was written.
