Oily Business

Keith Weston is the spin doctor for a major oil sands producer, tasked with selling the oil sands story to a doubting and suspicious public. His arch-nemesis, Gerry Culver, is a leading environmentalist who's convinced the "tar" sands are hastening the earth's demise. When a freak helicopter crash strands the two men together in the vast boreal forest of northern Alberta, they are forced not only to confront each other, but also to wrestle with their own inner demons and self-determination. As Weston and Culver await the rescue party, each recounts-through a series of alternating flashbacks-the events, histories, and colorful characters that brought them to that fateful point. The book's jarring conclusion will rock readers and leave them pondering their own beliefs and suppositions. Oily Business is a humorous, provocative, and sharply satirical novel, written by an author perfectly positioned to unmask the oil sands and separate the truth from the tar - the deliberate actions from the spiralling consequences of inaction, unchecked greed, and moral ambiguity.

Chris Dawson has been a senior writer for the Calgary Herald, press secretary to an Alberta cabinet minister, and a senior communications’ strategist for Petro-Canada, where he helped lead the company’s oil sands PR campaign. In addition to writing for numerous Canadian and U.S. magazines, Dawson has previously published two books of non-fiction with Johnson Books in Boulder, Colorado.