March 2001, in France, one year before presidential elections’s first turn. Lerois, a national agency cop and Piers Goodwhile, a mental handling specialist are charged to influence Victor Courtaillet, a parano gun’s amateur. Independently three consultants have to work with all the french medias. Their mission during twelve next months: to bring French people to such a fear of daily violence that Chirac’s adversary is necessarily Jean Marie le Pen and not Lionel Jospin on April 21, 2002. While associates of PML consulting work to direct medias so that they speak more and more of insecurity in the headlines, Goodwhile will bring Victor Courtaillet to prepare and make a massacre, apotheosis of the violence. Goodwhile is a champion in his job but it’s not difficult to influence Victor at the edge of the bankruptcy and which has missed his life. He doesn’t want to miss his exit !

Every month, we discover newspapers’s titles (all authentics and collected by the author) where the words “delinquency” and “violence” are more and more frequent. Every chapter, in the sphere of the government, characters influence Courtaillet and, a honest cop, lieutenant Carvelle who’ ll be caught in the toils. But also millions of Frenchs who chose Chirac and le Pen for the second turn.

Jean Hugues Oppel succeeds a beautiful work: with a calculated coldness, he methodically reports facts which succeed one another without any judgement. A simple but elaborate style which avoids any emphasis : facts, only facts that we follow without boring cause of the rhythm instilled by the author throughout book... without forsaking its characters.

But all that story is only a fiction, isn’t it. Only a writer can imagine such stories happening in France, our beautiful democratic country...