Since two school buses carrying more than sixty children disappeared on the highway, police teams, politicians, the media and all French people are waiting for only one thing: a sign of life, an element that would allow us to understand this mystery.
Until the day when a bus reappears, in Montpellier, empty, except for the phone of one of the kids. And a message: Tonight, 7 p.m. A man calls and demands to only speak with the Raid Captain, Talia Sorel. An expert in anti-terrorist negotiation, the thirty-four-year-old young woman finds herself in a case made all the more complicated by the fact that all her colleagues are convinced that she has a link with the kidnapper. At the same time, in the Italian Alps, Pierre Jonquet, 13, wonders: this camp we don’t leave, these parents we haven’t heard from, these counselors who prohibit access to the 4th floor of the chalet … If Pierre, the son of a cop, suspects something dirty, he doesn’t know that the countdown has started. That we must flee, quickly. Immersive and shocking, a thriller of remarkable technicality from a new voice in the genre.
Frank Leduc was born in 1968 in Paris. An executive in a large telephone group for eighteen years, he radically changed his life in 2014. He settled near Bayonne, where he worked as a management trainer and coach and devoted a large part of his time to ‘writing. Author of three novels, The Missing Link (Les Nouveaux Auteurs, 2018; Pocket, 2019), winner of the Femme Actual prize, Cléa and La Mémoire du temps (Les Nouveaux Auteurs, 2019, 2020; Pocket, 2023, 2021) as well as several collections of short stories, Duel is the first to be published by Belfond noir. An adaptation into a mini-series is in progress for France Télévisions
