The Poppy Broker

From the pink cliffs of Brittany to the painted wagons of Sicily, from the slums of Paris to the medieval estates of Europe, this romantic adventure moves at breakneck speed through a land of crime, love and deception. The kidnapping of beautiful French actress, Chantal Armand, forms the hub of a wheel around which art and science, sacrifice and arrogance, love and hate spin at a dizzying pace. The Poppy Broker leads us into the world of Tommaso Scalzone, a man as brilliant as he is glacial; a man who has masterminded a plot to associate Al Qaeda with the Mafia. His hunger for Chantal spawns an unforgettable cast of characters ─ Nadja, a sexy teenage runaway; Don Greco, a Mafia boss with a neck like a stack of tires; and Jean-François, an art collector whose love for Chantal leads him on a relentless but seemingly doomed quest to rescue her …

For those who would prefer more detail

Chantal Armand, a beautiful French stage actress, is trapped in a loveless marriage to the Deputy Minister of Culture. On tour in Bordeaux, she meets and falls in love with Jean-François Duret, a French aristocrat, art collector and patron of the theater. (He lives in an elegant château in the nearby wine country.) Thus begins a passionate, clandestine affair that seems certain to destroy the remnants of Chantal’s marriage and create a national scandal, only to end happily in an inevitable union with Jean-François.

At about the same time in Rome, a lucky hit by an obscure Italian geneticist produces a virus lethal to the opium poppy. It's like winning the lottery, thinks Noto, who takes his dangerous creation to Tommaso Scalzone, the Italian Interior Minister and head of the national police, on whose estate Noto grew up. Scalzone, brilliant and unassailable, will know where to sell a virus that will wipe out heroin and make them both rich beyond measure. He has no idea that Scalzone's immense power comes from the Mafia as well as the police, that Scalzone is one of the great criminal minds of our time and that Noto will lose his lottery ticket and his life.

In possession of the virus, Scalzone develops a diabolical plan. He will wipe out the world's opium crop, an anti-terrorist coup for which the US will receive credit B but not before he has genetically engineered a plant immune to the virus and sterile. Seeds to the sterile hybrid, easily transportable to any corner of the globe, will give him an airtight monopoly over opium and its derivatives for years to come.

But wait. There is one imposing obstacle. Scalzone does not have the opium plant resistant to the virus, let alone a sterile hybrid. There is, however, one scientist who can give him what he needs: a genetic engineer at the University of Paris named Claude Armand, Chantal’s father. For the required kidnapping, he relies on the Mafia pezzonovante with whom he is closest, Don Pippo Greco. The Don farms out the job to his hotshot nephew, Gianni (pronounced Johnny). Scalzone, in a fine expression of his shrewd criminal mind and brutal methods, enlists the support of a terrified Swiss German, the owner of a near-bankrupt genetics lab that has done secret military work in the past.

Chantal, on a visit to her ancestral home, is swept up in the kidnapping of her father and lands with him in the underground lab in Switzerland where he is to create Scalzone’s missing link. After exhaustive police investigations, they are both pronounced dead, thanks to the ingenious planning and execution of the crime.

Jean-François Duret returns to his life in the countryside outside Bordeaux, hopelessly bereft after losing the only woman he has ever loved. By the time he discovers a clue that Chantal might still be alive, she has become the object of Scalzone's perverse lust.