This is the second crime novel by French journalist Stéphane Pair, after Black Elastic (Fleuve Noir, 2017), a thriller set in Guadeloupe in the 1990s which addressed the explosion of drug trafficking in the region.
First stop in 1964 in Jérémie, Haiti, under the dictatorial regime of François Duvalier, a doctor elected president in 1957, who called himself “Papa Doc” and who based his power on the terrible “tontons macoutes”, a particularly bloodthirsty militia. “All night long, they beat, raped and killed according to orders but especially their inspiration.”
Little Sybille Sansaricq, five years old, miraculously escapes the massacre of her entire family and is secretly placed in an adoptive family.
The last survivor of the Sansaricq family will be found in 1986 in Cité-Soleil, a famous shantytown in Port-au-Prince, on the eve of the fall of the Duvalier regime. The dictator died in 1971, but his son Jean-Claude, known as “Bébé Doc”, immediately succeeded him. Sybille, a student and shadow activist, is close to the Salesian priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide (who, as we know, will be president of the country between 2001 and 2004), who introduced her to Jacques, the man with whom she will fall in love.
A drug trafficker who grew up in Miami, Jacques will help her to satisfy her vengeance and free Haiti, she hopes, from the dark forces that enslave it, working in the shadows on an insurrection with a handful of young Christian communists from the Port-au-Prince law school.
The young woman has in her sights Rosalie Bosquet, “the iron lady of Haiti”, better known as Madame Max Adolphe, director of the terrible Fort-Dimanche prison in Port-au-Prince, leader of the tontons macoutes, “liege woman” of the Latin American drug cartels who use Haiti as a vestibule to bring their merchandise into the United States. At the controls of violence and murder, this bloodthirsty woman seems both haunted and dehumanized by the death of her son.
As we know, the real Rosalie Bosquet vanished during the overthrow of Bébé Doc in February 1986. The woman apparently died in the United States in 1998, at the age of 96. Other characters are inspired by reality, such as the Sansaricq family — whose massacre is remembered as the “Jérémiennes Vespers.” And like the “real Jacques Baudoin Ketant, considered one of the most important Haitian drug traffickers” today, as Stéphane Pair also writes in the author’s note of Caribbean Fury.
A bit of truth, parts of history brought to life through fiction, a burning immersion in this “chaos country” gangrened by corruption, terror and exile: an explosive and exciting cocktail which gives us some keys to understanding the contemporary reality of this Caribbean country.