One morning in a park, James Sim finds a dying man who whispers a single word—“Samedi”—before collapsing.

Shortly after, James is abducted, delivered to a strange asylum, and drawn into a web of shifting testimony and seduction, where motives remain obscured and language itself feels unreliable.

Ball uses the scaffolding of a thriller—a murder, a conspiracy, a countdown—to construct a philosophical allegory, held together by symbols within a world governed by rules that are never fully disclosed. It is a novel about complicity and submission disguised as a mystery, and its tension comes less from revelation than from controlled ambiguity.