France has suffered its fair share of violence in the post-colonial era. First it was as a result of the Algerian independence struggle and very recently, high-impact acts of terrorism inspired or perpetrated by the so-called Islamic State group. The Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan shootings in Paris, followed by the Labour Day truck rampage in Nice shook not only France, but all of Europe.

James Patterson’s latest novel, Private Paris, is a fantastic story of an extremely complex wave of terror activities that are on the verge of bringing the French security apparatus to its knees. This is the 11th book in the Private series and co-written with Mark Sullivan. It sets off with a cliché: it’s the disenfranchised North African Muslim community living in the infamous suburbs of Paris that is planning and perpetrating the terror attacks in France. But the nuances make it far from conventional and ordinary, compelling one to continue reading what may have otherwise been a predictable plot.

Jack Morgan, founder of Los Angeles-based high-tech global security firm Private, arrives in Paris for a visit and to see his friend Louis Langlois, who heads Private’s office in the city. There he receives a call from his extremely wealthy client Sherman Wilkerson in Malibu, requesting him to urgently track his granddaughter Kimberly, his only living family member and heir. Before Morgan is able to get hold of Kimberly — who keeps slipping through his fingers while on the run from ruthless drug dealers — he becomes embroiled in a series of murders of France’s cultural elite, “the esteemed members of L’Academie Francaise.” He is hired by the wife of Henri Richard, director of the Paris Opera and the first one to be murdered, to investigate the deaths as religious and ethnic tensions rise in the city.

An imagined world where acts of terrorism turn out to be self-inflicted

Killed in ruthless, symbolic fashion, the one thing common between the dead persons is the presence of a graffiti tag “AB-16” at the murder site. From preliminary investigations it becomes quite obvious that this is another spate of purportedly “Islamic terror” and investigations are carried out with this premise. It becomes even more obvious when AB-16 releases a letter to the media that exhorts war against the decadent French culture, and calls for replacing it with one more chaste.

As Muslim immigrant suspects are taken into custody, French law-enforcement agencies are nowhere close to solving the mystery of the tag or the group behind the violence. There is, however, no stopping Morgan, whose involvement is clearly disliked by the French authorities. Nevertheless, he almost singlehandedly continues his investigations, taking upon himself the task of unearthing the perpetrators behind these extraordinary acts of terror.

Once Haja Hamid — one of the suspects — is caught, and her connection to Richard’s murder is established, Morgan has an alternative theory. In the midst of a gunbattle between the French army and immigrant protestors, upon witnessing an asymmetrical response from Major Emile Sauvage, Morgan’s fantastic theory becomes even more plausible — it was this army officer along with his accomplices who “murdered five of France’s finest people to try and set off a war against Islam.”

Major Sauvage and his co-conspirators’ hatred for and fear of Muslim immigrants is so strong that, “We’ll create provocation, and then la pagaille, in the chaos of battle, we’ll retaliate. Hard. [...] Vanquish them. Drive them from our land.”

The book compounds one of the most popular conspiracy theories regarding contemporary terror attacks in the West: that they are self-perpetrated with the ulterior aim of advancing some kind of political or military agenda on the part of the civil, military and/or economic leadership of the country concerned or even a section of society. Patterson gives in to this conspiracy theory, but does so in a very genuine and believable manner. Having read this book it becomes harder to insist that this is not entirely possible — especially considering the wave of xenophobia gripping parts of Europe at the moment, feeding the ultra right-wing conservative agenda.

Some sections of French society make no secret of the fact that they are not too fond of, and in fact wholly despise the heavy immigration from France’s ex-colonies, claiming that the majority of immigrants fail to adequately assimilate into their culture.

Patterson’s protagonist Morgan, despite being a visitor to the country, is able to investigate the multiple and complex murders all on his own, without any support or intelligence, in a very short period of time. While this seems to be a deliberate attempt at mocking the entire French security apparatus, it is not. It is literary liberty the writer chooses to take in order to glorify his protagonist. Similarly, the battle between the French security forces and provoked protestors may seem a bit outlandish to those not familiar with the dynamics of Paris’s suburbs that house the immigrant population, but it does produce an impact.

Overall, the angle of Wilkerson and his granddaughter Kimberly seems misplaced and unnecessary and the reader keeps wondering till the end if a connection between the two plots will eventually be found, but to no avail. Having said that, Patterson introduces just enough characters — considering the depth of the plot — that can be taken along without losing significance on the way.

Private Paris is indeed a gripping read. Its brilliance lies in the unpredictability of its end, built up so carefully that at no point during the story does Patterson let escape what he is getting at. Unfortunately one key element absent in the narrative, unlike most other books set in Paris, is that the connection with the city remains peripheral and at times vacant, which is a pity.

The reviewer is a former member of staff

Private Paris
By James Patterson and Mark Sullivan
Arrow, UK
ISBN: 978-1784751982
544pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 9th, 2017