A corrupt mining company, repossessed gravestones, a man’s fractured past, mysterious notes posted to lampposts and murder deep in the highlands of Guatemala. In Tailings of Warren Peace, Stephen Law effortlessly weaves these elements into a powerful story of love and memory, exploring how the past haunts us and how solidarity can save us all. Mysterious, passionate and powerful, Tailings of Warren Peace shows us the interconnections that exist between us, transcending social class, culture and geography.

“Tailings of Warren Peace is a gripping tale that eerily reflects a disturbing reality in global politics. It takes the reader on a scintillating and mysterious journey that twists and turns from Canada to Guatemala, war to peace, and loss to love. This book is a celebration of the human spirit.” — Garry Leech, author of Beyond Bogota ”Tailings of Warren Peace manages to wind disparate threads into a ripping yarn, wound around personal stories … While the characters and the situations may be fictional, they bring to light truths too often kept hidden, telling of the depth of disruption and corruption engendered by mining companies’ insatiable need to profit from the Earth’s riches and the workers who extract them … A great read.” — Jamie Kneen, MiningWatch Canada

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I didn’t think I was up for another fictional social justice book with a white male hero who needs to descend into his shattered self to find the heroics necessary to save the so-called day. So when Tailings of Warren Peace showed up at my door, I was sceptical to say the least. I mean, giving the protagonist the name Warren Peace?

That’s an invitation not to be taken seriously.

But make no mistake, author Stephen Law has taken a genre where few have recently shone and crafted a story that will have you shirking whatever you said you’d be doing. You’ll miss appointments for this book. The house will go dirty(er). The dogs will howl for dinner. It’s that good.

Main character Warren Peace has the necessary checkered past, and of course he’s necessarily running from it, hoping just to fade into the wallflower category of life. He’s a Cape Bretoner in Toronto, looking to stay lost.

But he’s also a mildly clairvoyant tombstone repo-man who from time to time gets vibes and visuals from the tombstones he’s paid to truck away, and someone’s out there, looking for him to dust off his gloves and get back in the ring of life in a big way.

The intrigue comes fast and furious, as that someone – whether for good or bad – is furtively leaving a tragic story stapled to the telephone poles outside of Peace’s apartment.

With these clues and the help of his downstairs neighbour, and a cast of incredibly strong female characters, Peace pieces together an epic tale of mining injustice, and corporate murders unavenged, that spans continents. The names have been fictionalized, but it’s a story that is sadly plausible to anyone familiar with Canadian mining techniques in Latin America, and around the world.

I loved this book, because Law peppers it with realistic characters who are neither uni-dimensional, nor borne into a blind and unquestioning crusade of activism and social justice that the reader can’t be expected to understand or match.

These are people with personal doubts and dilemmas, who get WAY the hell in over their heads. You’ll feel their vulnerability, but against the odds you’ll also come to share their infectious passion for justice. It’s an action packed book, and if I had a million dollars and/or knew how to operate a movie camera, I’d put money down on this being the next summer blockbuster.

Hell, after reading Tailings of Warren Peace, I’d trust Law to mastermind a radical action against any of the myriad shady companies that foul the Canadian corporate landscape. This book inspires the reader to walk taller and throw their own monkey wrench into the heart of this broken system.