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by D. H. Brown (Author)
Three childhood friends reconnect as adults in 1994, thirty years after they were separated during the bloody 1964 civil war in the Congo. Two of them were rescued by mercenaries and the third stayed behind to look after a mother being treated for leprosy. Their wartime experience affected each child differently and they grow up with intermittent reminders of fear and death, never knowing when the leopard that stalks them will reveal herself-something that as adults they recognize as varying shades of depression and post-traumatic stress.
DANNY is a Canadian photojournalist who frequently covers news stories in east and central Africa and always finds time to search for the friend he grew up with and promised to find.
SALAMU, a Belgian Congolese nurse working in Rwanda at the very brink of the country's genocide, realizes she must leave the country as her bi-racial skin colour makes her look as if she could be Tutsi.
OLIVIA, a British clinical psychologist working in London, hears of the other two friends connecting, and all three agree to meet up at a lodge deep in Congo's Virunga Mountains, one of the bases for gorilla watching tours.
Within days they find themselves hostages of a militia group working for a rogue coltan miner. Held in captivity at an abandoned mission house, they meet fellow hostage, LEO, the chief game warden of a nearby national park, who in the 1960s had been a young mercenary.
As the tense days go by, the stories unravel and with the help of the warden, they come to terms with many of the troubled memories of childhood. Salamu is reluctant to tell the others of her time as a child soldier and the dark secret she promised to keep from Danny. When a traditional healer arrives to treat a sick hostage, Salamu recognizes him from her former life.
Will she be forced to tell the secret she has kept from her friends?
Will the three friends be able to accept their unique past-an understanding denied them as children-and move towards healing?
Of course, healing is only relevant if they can escape alive from their current captivity.
