Flight of the Storks — Jean-Christophe Grange

A journey to the green inferno of the African jungle brings one man face to face with his macabre past. Every year the storks would set off on their astounding 12,000-mile migration from Northern Europe to the remote Central African Republic. One year, inexplicably, puzzling numbers of them fail to return. At the invitation of a Swiss ornithologist, Louis Antioch agrees to investigate the mystery of the birds' disappearance. Before he can set off on his quest, however, his patron is found dead in bizarre circumstances. Jean-Christophe Grang-'s uncompromising narrative develops at a nightmare pace from a Bulgarian gypsy encampment to a kibbutz in the Occupied Territories, to the African jungle, to Calcutta, where an appalling and gruesome truth emerges: the end of a mission that began with the Flight of the Storks-