And of course that is a defining mode in the world today - states practicing terror on recalcitrant nations and individuals, all in the name of progress, democracy, liberty. Abroad, economic terror, chemicals, explosives and hi-tech weapons; domestically, more economic terror, militarization of police, maximum security prisons - and the death penalty.

The Land of the Free has the highest per capita prison population of any country in the world, and is one of the few advanced, industrial democracies to retain capital punishment. The Good Doctor Guillotin asks why, and looks at the rational thinking that spawns irrationalities.

Marc Estrin's fiction has continually examined such paradoxes, most often in a comic vein. In this, his first non-comic novel, he explores the converging fates of five crucial characters in a world much like our own, a world shaking with Revolution.