Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; The darkness comes again. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. —W. B. Yeats This is a noir novel looking at the dark side of contemporary life, with romance, love, and fear amid the very real horrors of the present and the probability of the nightmare to come as Western civilization collapses. Jasmine, a budding artist, and her new boyfriend, Colin, become inadvertently involved in a terrorist/hostage situation in London. Kidnapped at gunpoint, Jasmine is smuggled to Iraq where she becomes an unwilling ISIS bride. Eventually she ends up as a concubine in Saudi Arabia. The Western authorities show no interest in trying to locate her. As a result of willful government misunderstanding of events during the kidnapping, Colin ends up in jail. After experiencing terrifying encounters in prison, he is finally freed with the help of his Hong Kong–based mother using exceedingly unconventional means. Several years later, while still a captive, Jasmine meets Colin. With the help of his mother, and her underworld associates, he undertakes a violent rescue from a Saudi yacht in the harbor in Monaco. During her captivity Jasmine has overheard a plot to explode nuclear devices in the United States. After her rescue she faces the very real problem of trying to alert a complacent and corrupt world to this impending catastrophe.