The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios-YANN MARTEL

Den Laurey, the leader of one of the country’s most violent biker gangs, should have been behind bars. But thanks to a daring escape on the L.A. freeway, several US marshals are dead and Laurey is riding free. Tim Rackley, back on the service’s warrant squad, is in hot pursuit of the outlaw and his ruthless gang–with a media whirlwind and the entire Los Angeles law enforcement community dogging him. Tim’s search leads him into a dark world of deception, of criminals and undercover cops, and drugs and mutilation. With the stakes rising, Tim must unravel a horrifying secret and confront a deadly terror that reaches from the back alleys of Mexico to the poppy fields of Afghanistan–and threatens to explode on the dark streets of L.A.

Bruno Salvador, known to friends and enemies alike as Salvo, is the ever-innocent, twenty-nine-year-old orphaned love-child of a Catholic Irish missionary and a Congolese headman’s daughter. Educated first at mission school in the East Congolese province of Kivu, and later at a discreet sanctuary for the secret sons of Rome, Salvo is inspired by his mentor Brother Michael to train as a professional interpreter in the minority African languages of which, almost from birth, he has been an obsessive collector.

Soon a rising star in his profession, he is courted by City corporations, hospitals, law courts, the Immigration services and – inevitably – the mushrooming overworld of British Intelligence. He is also courted – and won – by the all-white, Surrey-born Penelope, star reporter on one of our great national newspapers, whom with typical impulsiveness he promptly marries. Yet even as the story opens, a contrary and irresistible love is dawning in him.

Despatched to a no-name island in the North Sea to attend a top-secret meeting between Western financiers and East Congolese warlords, Salvo is obliged to interpret matters never intended for his re-awoken African conscience.