Plot summary

A little over a year ago, nine terrorists drove into Paris with guns, grenades, and suicide belts. They were there to perpetrate a coordinated, calculated mass murder on behalf of ISIL and, more symbolically, to launch an assault on culture itself, by turning the city’s houses of mirth – soccer stadiums, cafés, restaurants, and of course, the Bataclan concert hall – into monuments to death and fear. They wanted to spill blood, to shut the West up.