How much more remains to be said about Bre-X? Like the Titanic, it’s all over now – except perhaps the lawsuits. In the rush to publish first, early books about Bre-X, the greatest mining scam in history, tended to be a rehash of old newspaper clippings. Now, a year later, investigative journalist Jennifer Wells has added her finely detailed analysis, based on research in Indonesia, to the stockpile. If one were going to buy or read only one book about Bre-X, this should be it.

Like many a riveting mystery, Wells’ book begins with a dead body: geologist Mike de Guzman. From there she backtracks and traces the steps that led to the notorious fraud. Wells explains the arcana of mining terms, facets of Indonesian society, and sifts through voluminous evidence to draw her own conclusions about what happened. Among her conclusions: de Guzman is well and truly dead and it taxes credulity to believe John Felderhof really couldn’t have known what was going on. She picks holes in David Walsh’s explanation of what happened: on one occasion he argued for Bre-X’s professionalism, that they weren’t trying to promote the company on a here-today-gone-tomorrow basis; later he stated that he didn’t have a clue about what was happening.

As in her earlier book on Murray Pezim, Wells writes well, in an entertaining tongue-in-cheek style. She’s subtle. She doesn’t hit the reader over the head with weighty conclusions, but points to what’s plausible, and what isn’t. Her irreverent style is refreshing, and a long way from the dryness and hackneyed style that pervades so many business tomes.