At the heart of this novel is the notion that a sexual predator can find natural cover for his activities in a war zone. Its title is taken from a Turkish phrase meaning a woman who unwittingly arouses a man’s sexual interest. The narrator, Connie Burns, is a foreign correspondent, born in Zimbabwe, educated at Oxford and at home in the troubled places of the world. In Sierra Leone, she reports on the rape and murder of several local women, and her suspicions are aroused by the presence in Freetown of John Harwood, a former British soldier and mercenary, whom she knew under another name in Kinshasa. Two years later, in 2004, he pops up under a third name in occupied Baghdad as a ‘security consultant’, and there are murders with a similar modus operandi.
Connie attempts to expose him. Harwood’s increasingly violent responses culminate in her kidnapping as she attempts to flee Iraq. He subjects her to a carefully calibrated series of tortures and sexual humiliations. After three days, he releases her. Terrorised into holding her tongue, Connie refuses to talk about her ordeal and takes refuge in England. At first the media and the police assume that Islamic terrorists kidnapped her; but as her silence continues, they suspect her disappearance was no more than a publicity stunt. Clearly traumatised, she refuses treatment.
Under an assumed name, she rents a large, decaying house in the depths of Dorset and waits, sick with fear, for Harwood to track her down and finish the job he began. But her new neighbours have their problems, too — a grimly Gothic family feud going back for generations whose outcome depends on an old woman dying of Alzheimer’s in a nursing home. Connie cannot avoid becoming entangled with some of the locals.
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