Over sixty children have been taken hostage during a school trip to the mountains. Can they be saved in time or will they have to save themselves?

Ever since two school buses carrying more than sixty children on a trip to the mountains disappeared on the highway, the police, politicians, media and all French people have been waiting for only one thing: a sign of life. Until the day when one of the buses reappears in Montpellier, emptied of everything except for the phone of one of the children. A message is left near it: “Tonight, 7 p.m.”

A man calls and demands to speak with RAID Captain Talia Sorel and her alone. An expert in anti-terrorist negotiations, the 32-year-old young woman, takes on a case made all the more complicated by the fact that all her colleagues are convinced that she has a link with the kidnapper: how could he know her identity which is concealed through defense secrecy? And the man’s demands are exuberant: 600 million euros. Far beyond anything the State could agree to pay.

At the same time, in the Italian Alps, Pierre Jonquet, 13, starts to think something is strange about this school trip: they never leave the camp, they haven’t heard from their parents, and the counselors keep them away from the 4th floor of the chale As the son of a cop, Pierre thinks this is all very suspicious. He knows that kidnappings end badly in the vast majority of cases. But he doesn’t realize that the countdown has already begun. That they must flee, quickly!

Frank Leduc was born in 1968 in Paris. Passionate about history, sport and nature, his first novel, Le Chaînonmissant (Les Nouveaux Auteurs, 2018) was a scientific thriller for which he won the Prix Femme Actuelle. Two other novels have followed: Cléa (Les Nouveaux Auteurs, 2019) and La Mémoire du temps (Les Nouveaux Auteurs, 2020). Duel is his first novel to be published by Belfond Noir.