Pact of silence
Pact of Silence (original title The Betrayed ) is a 2006 crime novel by the American writer David Hosp .
Pact of Silence is based on the tried and tested action pattern of classic detective novels: a crime occurs, in the course of the police investigation several suspects emerge, and at the end the perpetrator is exposed in a dramatic showdown.
action
The corpse of a young reporter, covered in severe marks of torture, is discovered in her apartment in a shabby area of Washington, DC . The investigating officers, detectives Cassian and Train, discover to their surprise that the victim's mother is the extremely wealthy industrialist Lydia Chapin.
The first traces point to a local drug dealer, who soon turns out to be innocent. An attempt is made to uncover her last activities by evaluating the murdered reporter's computer files. Apparently she was investigating medical experiments more than thirty years ago that were carried out on juvenile inmates of a mental hospital without their consent.
It quickly becomes clear that influential industrialists, renowned scientists and high-ranking politicians, including a presidential candidate, were involved in what happened at the time. Together with the victim's sister, Lydia, Cassian and Train try to connect the crimes of decades past to the present. The closer they get to the truth, the more Lydia's life is in danger. She barely escapes the assassination attempt by a professional killer.
In the end it turns out that the forbidden experiments were resumed in complete secrecy. Funded by the Ministry of Health, attempts were made to test newly developed vaccines in order to circumvent the lengthy regulatory approval procedures. It was hoped to be better equipped against terrorist attacks with biological weapons.
Text output
- David Hosp: Pact of Silence ("The betrayed"). Goldmann, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-442-46024-3 .
- David Hosp: The betrayed . Simon & Schuster, London 2006, ISBN 978-0-7432-6387-0 .
annotation
The novel Pact of Silence is not to be confused with Pact of Silence (Le pact du silence), a documentary about the war criminal Erich Priebke .