The Prisoner

     Paris, November 13, 2015. You love your wife so much that you decide to prove it to her by spending a romantic weekend in Paris together. After a magical day of museums, Bohemian neighborhoods and accordion music, you have dinner in an equally magical restaurant in where food is served in the dark. You decide that the perfect day will culminate in a rock concert by her favorite band in a famous Parisian venue, the Bataclan.

     Days later, Paul Hébert, a French journalist covering a story in Iraq for an American newspaper, tells in first person the circumstances of his abduction by a jihadist group. Kneeling in a row of prisoners, the terrorists are about to behead him. Paul is facing the last seconds of life as he tries, desperately, to find a way to escape the inevitable.

    With his wits and his vast knowledge about cinema as his only weapons, using his sense of humor as his main source of strength, Paul strategizes an absolutely insane plan to build a fantasy around the jihadists and escape from certain death. 

    Three months after, Paul wakes up safe and sound in a hospital; however, he does not remember anything about what happened during his captivity. The public has followed his kidnapping and Paul has become a celebrity. But the circumstances of his release are a mystery. On his cell phone, Paul finds a video where he sees himself hooded and dressed as a terrorist, proclaiming the threat of a devastating bomb in the heart of the United States.

     The threat is real, to deactivate the bomb Paul will have to follow his own footsteps and rebuild his insane plan of escape. However, with every discovery of his forgotten past, he will find a new threat in the present. It is the beginning of a psychological odyssey, filled with obstacles that will take Paul from Houston to Washington, and finally to Paris, to the very night of the ISIS attacks where he will understand that his fate is tragically linked to that of the couple in love.

     The fact is that nothing and no one, not even himself, is what it appears to be.

     With a surprising end, The Prisoner is a novel built around an ingenious delirium, with the mechanics of suspense that will surprise the reader again and again and will force him to plunge into the dark depths of the human soul where love, hate, desire for revenge and the fight for survival are revealed as the real engines of history.