A French journalist who'd covered the Afghan war is assassinated and a child brutally maimed over evidence of U.S. weapons provided to the Middle East amounting to billions of dollars paid for by heroin. Eight years later, in 1998, the journalist's young American widow comes to Pakistan in a search for the truth, only to find herself trapped in a dangerous world of nuclear tests, terrorist attacks, covert intelligence operations, corporate power chess, attempted assassinations, and murder. And also finds that she is, once again, in love. What emerges is a rich and sensitive exploration of the Islamic culture of today as it collides with the West. "The Black Silk Road" gives terrorism a human face, treating the terrorism perpetrated by the Islamic East, in as honest, real, and even-handed manner, as the terrorism of the corporate, covert-intelligence-driven, militarized West.