Eternalis - Raymond Khoury - book

After the worldwide success of the Last Templar , the new bestseller by Raymond Khoury, takes us on the trail of one of humanity's oldest dreams.

Baghdad, 2003. The American army makes a gruesome discovery: an underground laboratory containing the corpses of dozens of individuals who had apparently served as guinea pigs for terrible experiments. The perpetrator of these tortures, nicknamed "Hakim" – the doctor in Arabic – manages to escape. The only clue: an ouroboros, the snake biting its tail, symbol of eternity, has been drawn on the wall of one of the torture cells.

Beirut, 2006. Mia, a geneticist on assignment in Lebanon, witnesses the kidnapping of her mother, Evelyn, in the street. Evelyn, a passionate archaeologist, was negotiating the purchase of a rare book, a codex decorated with an ouroboros, which she absolutely wanted to obtain. Desperate to do anything to find her mother, Mia teams up with Jim Corben, a CIA agent who establishes a link between the codex and the crimes committed in Iraq three years earlier.

To save Evelyn, Jim and Mia embark on a race against time across the Middle East. From Beirut to Baghdad, via Turkey, they attempt to understand what lies within this codex, which alchemists have been passing on for centuries at the risk of their lives. A Cartesian, Mia refuses to believe esoteric clues. But surprising revelations await her, some intimately linked to the mystery of her own origins...