I type a lot of things into Google. This morning it was morel sausages, heroes of the Resistance and Nairobi. All very innocent stuff. But a few months back, it was the rather more sinister white slave trade. No, I’m not thinking of shipping a van load of concubines to a Bahraini prince, I’m just wondering if it’s possible. Or rather, Charlotte wonders that in Mystery Manor, n° 4 in the Magali Rousseau mystery series, in which the two women go looking for missing teenagers.
‘Like in that film, Taken – did you see it? Supposedly based on a true story but it turned out to be a complete fabrication. The man went round saying his daughter had been captured by Albanians and turned into a sex slave. It was rubbish.’
‘Yet here we are crossing the country simply because someone planted the idea in our heads.’
‘But it can’t be ruled out entirely. No stone unturned. Isn’t that one of your expressions?’
The white slave trade did exist, of course, for almost three centuries, starting around 1500. It’s difficult to say how many Europeans were captured and sold on the Barbary Coast of North Africa. One historian puts it at over a million. Which is why today the term arouses fantasies and fears, and why William Hillar, the man behind the Taken story, was able to make a fortune before being exposed as a fraud.
In my research I also came across Chloe Ayling, who in 2017 was kidnapped by a Polish man, Lukasz Herba, a member (so he claimed) of a gang called Black Death, specialised in selling sex slaves to Saudi Arabia. He kept her in a farmhouse in Italy until he found out she was pregnant, when he released her. But Ayling’s ordeal wasn’t over: when she told her story to the media, it was greeted with incredulity and dismissed as a publicity stunt. Last year, though, Herba was found guilty and sentenced to almost 17 years in prison. At least in his own mind, the white slave trade was real enough for him to put the fantasy into action.
And what of Mystery Manor? Could the teenagers who go missing really be on their way to slavery? Well, as Charlotte says, and the Chloe Ayling story shows, it can't be entirely ruled out...
A house deep in the country. Shutters closed, surrounded by a 12-foot fence.
Cameras inside. And food. Mountains of food.
A woman’s voice, sweet as a spoonful of honey: ‘Welcome to Mystery Manor, Sarah. Here you will find all you need. Except one thing. Communication with the outside world.’
Five missing teenagers.
‘Don’t worry, they’ll be back soon. They must have just run away.’
Or is it something more sinister? What is going on in Mystery Manor?
As the clock runs down, Magali and Charlotte hunt for clues all over France in a desperate attempt to find out.
Are you ready to join them?
It’s a journey you won’t forget.
Mystery Manor is due for release on June 14th.
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Be entertained by the miscellaneous thoughts and humour of a British writer in France
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