Book one of two

Driftwood

A novel by Devin Halden & Adam Jones

In 1997, $150 million in gold vanished from a Minneapolis bank. Twenty-eight years later, a waitress diving in a Louisiana river finds one bar of it.

Driftwood, paperback edition
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Case summary
The bank
Mariner Bank & Trust
The city
Minneapolis
The year
1997
Still missing
$150,000,000
Resurfaced in
Bayou Courbé, LA
Elapsed
Three days
The story

A failed robbery starts looking less like a failure.

The tranquil Cajun town of Bayou Courbé is thrown into danger when a waitress finds a gold bar while diving in a Louisiana river. It isn't ordinary treasure. It's a relic of the notorious 1997 Mariner Bank and Trust heist in Minneapolis — a robbery everyone agreed had gone wrong.

The discovery sets off a gold rush. Kira Devereaux, the diver who found the bar, searches for the rest as tourists descend on the town, invading its waters and riling up the gators. Roger McKenna, the FBI agent who ran the '97 investigation, comes out of retirement to reopen the case that cost him his career and his family.

Within three days the whole town is swept into something beyond its control: a humble crabber, a drifting teen, a dangerous Minnesota crime family, and every officer of the local law.

Driftwood is an intricately plotted, character-driven adventure about identity and reinvention — funny, suspenseful, and told entirely in the present tense. A mystery that surprises you not once but again and again.

Is $150 million in stolen gold buried in the bayou?

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The authors

Twenty years of friendship. Sixteen since they were last in the same room.

Devin Halden

Twin Cities, Minnesota

Author, animator, and lead writer at Pixovi Animation Studio. He founded Minnesota's Solstice Film Festival in 2005, launched the Pixovi Movie Network, and has worked with Warner Bros. and DreamWorks. With Adam Jones he co-hosts the weekly StoryOsophy podcast and built Story Blūprint, an app for mapping non-linear plots.

Adam Jones

West Virginia

Screenwriter, director, producer, and actor. He has appeared in features and in History's "Hatfields & McCoys" and AMC's "The American West," and worked on more than twenty studio films and 130 episodes of television, including "The Sopranos" and "Saturday Night Live." His directorial debut, "Cross Eyed," won Audience Choice and Grand Jury awards on the festival circuit.

Devin and Adam met in 2006, when Devin programmed Adam's feature "Cross Eyed" into the Solstice Film Festival after screening hundreds of films that hadn't made the cut. Adam drove from New York City to St. Paul for it. He found Devin at the opening night party, working the room, and introduced himself — and Devin answered by quoting one of Adam's own lines back at him: "Did you know these things are heavy?" In the film, Adam's character says it about a fire hydrant he'd stolen, now sitting in his New York living room. Adam later spent several months living in Devin's downtown Minneapolis condo, where they wrote scripts together. The last time they were in the same room was Santa Monica, 2010. Everything since — including Driftwood — has been written across eleven hundred miles.

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