On the first pages, you witness two men attacking a third man in a restroom and kidnapping him. But very soon you realize: they are not the hunters, they are those who are hunted. The hunter is a woman called “Virginia Woolf”, a person with tremendous psychological powers, apparently. Then, at a moment when you absolutely have to know how the story continues, it’s interrupted and a storyline in the past, seemingly with little connection to the present, is introduced. But then you find the first clue, and little by little the connections are revealed, the storylines pushing each other forward at a breathtaking pace. It’s like a hurricane revolving faster and faster, the eye of the storm being a mysterious incident in a small mining town in the Australian outback.

So on one level this is a story about words, how the brain processes words and puts up de-fenses, and how these defenses can be taken down. It’s about an organization educating a rather creepy elite. On this level, I would have wished that the issues about neurolinguistics and psychology would have been a bit more elaborated, they remained quite vague. It was rather like “take this as a fact, or else leave it”. However, the book worked extremely well as a thriller, as I tried to indicate above. It’s very cleverly plotted and the best thriller I’ve read in qute a while. I don’t really like the phrase “I couldn’t put it down” that much, but with this one I definitely have to use it myself. ( )