Kirjahaku

Sylvie is on the run from the men of the Congolese dictator who killed her father and raped her mother. The only way she can survive in Pointe Noire is by selling her body under a false name to hard-bitten oil company men she attracts in nightclubs, discoth ques and bars. She knows that if she can leave the Congo she has the education and good looks to make a success of herself and earn enough money to get her mother and sisters out of the Country before they are discovered by the Cobras, one of the Dictator's militias. The Dictator's men control all the borders. They will do everything possible to kill her before she can leave the country. One night she is picked up by a wealthy Frenchman who offers her a job in France and who takes care of all of the paperwork. The first few months of her new life as a highly-paid escort working mainly for French arms industry executives and their clients are too good to be true. When she meets a politician who used to know her father she thinks he will help her, but he puts her in a situation as bad as if she was in the sights of the Cobras.

The Franco-American psychiatrist Professor J. O'Neill is still proud of the work he did with a couple of Mormon colleagues developing enhanced interrogation techniques for the CIA in places like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and black sites all over the world. But after publication of the U.S. Senate's report into CIA torture he became a pariah among fellow psychologists in North America and had to move back to France. In exchange for his unorthodox methods of reintegrating into French society violent jihadis returning from their terrorist activities in Syria and Iraq, the French deep state has given him total control of a rundown psychiatric institution in Paris. He continues to use the enhanced interrogation techniques developed for the CIA, reframing them for the French as a form of enhanced therapy. The psychiatric institution in Paris is now known as the Black House. In addition to the returning jihadis, O'Neill experiments on patients with delusional disorders, focusing on how to prevent them from having a greater choice of behavioral patterns than are available to their psychiatrists. This work of fiction recounts the brutal physical and mental battle between O'Neill and a man of no fixed identity.