La Terreur Rouge

Three years ago, Tom Ashby watched a hundred and thirty people burn alive on a commuter train in Paris. Forty-seven of them were children. The world was told it was a wiring fault. Tom, a British financial consultant living in Shanghai, kept his mouth shut and went back to his life. He buried what he saw on that platform so deep he almost believed it himself.

Then one evening in a bar, he said the wrong thing in front of the wrong microphone.

Now the Chinese state apparatus that silenced a trainload of passengers is coming for him. Tom and his girlfriend Jia must get out of China alive, through a manhunt run by a man who has never failed to close a file. Their friends are killed in their apartments. Jia's parents are murdered on their farm. Every person who stood close enough to hear what Tom said is being erased, and the machine doing the erasing does not stop, does not negotiate, and does not leave witnesses.

By the time they reach England, the only safe ground left is a farmhouse in Bedfordshire where the ghosts of a Paris railway platform are waiting for both of them.

La Terreur Rouge is a literary thriller in the tradition of le Carré, Mick Herron, and Buchan. An ordinary man caught in an extraordinary manhunt across three countries and three languages. From the neon sprawl of Shanghai to the quiet lanes of the English countryside, where the most dangerous things happen in kitchens, on footpaths, and behind closed curtains. The prose is slow-burn, observation-heavy, and rich with dark humour. There are no gadgets, no car chases, no superhuman protagonists. Just a financial consultant who saw something he was never supposed to see, and a state that will cross continents to make sure he never speaks of it again.

Set in the Poppy Universe. La Terreur Rouge is Richard Cave's eleventh novel.