In the Name of Love

In the Name of Love is a thriller about the sex slave trade chock full of believable, well-developed compelling characters. Two women are the central focus of the novel – the one an unscrupulous criminal, the other her victim. Rimana, a young Indian woman, is thrilled to be headhunted by a company in Canada and pleased to escape her mother’s expectations of marriage. On the flight to Canada she meets Jug, a young Canadian man whose mother was Indian, and by the time they arrive in Toronto they are well on their way to falling in love. When Rimana doesn’t contact Jug after arrival he begins to worry that something bad has happened to her. Through a series of efforts to find her as well as one lucky coincidence, he and his two best friends, the daredevil Omar Khazana, and the over-cautious movie buff, Mark Willis, manage against all odds to rescue Rimana from the Yemeni sheik who has bought her and the traffickers who want her returned to the sheik.

Along the way we learn the back-stories of two of the leaders of human trafficking rings who have themselves been shaped by violence and human trafficking. A woman named Nadira, who runs the opulent Toronto brothel, Paradise, and Sultan, a pimp who was mutilated as a result of his love for a trafficked prostitute that got away, and now runs a rival gang. With both Nadira’s goons and the police hot on the heels of Jug, Ramina, and Jug’s two friends, they realize that their only chance of survival is to enlist the support of Sultan, Nadira’s rival. Sultan offers them protection and uses them to trap Nadira. But can they survive Nadira’s wrath and cunning, as well as Sultan’s keen desire for revenge, or will they eventually become pawns in another gangster’s world?

The novel exposes the ongoing existence of human trafficking in affluent countries, the violence that accompanies it, and the system of corruption and willing johns and buyers who keep it in business.