The Forty-One Seconds

By Cornelis van Houte

A Belgian structural engineer walks the perimeter of the Federal Reserve Building in New York. Twice. He is not there to admire it.

He is there because somewhere in the sub-basement vault, behind a cryptographic lock, is a ledger in his dead wife's handwriting - evidence of the financial architecture that funded the Rwandan genocide. Evidence that has waited thirty years for someone who knew how she thought.

Beside him is Sandrine: twenty-two years younger, Rwandan-born, a survivor who rebuilt herself from precision when everything else was taken. Together they have forty-one seconds - a gap in the building's security grid, a flaw so human in its origin that no one thought to correct it.

The Forty-One Seconds is a heist novel that refuses to behave like one. Told in the measured voice of a man who has spent a lifetime assessing what structures will hold and which promises will break, it is a story about grief, complicity, and what it costs to carry the weight of an unanswered crime - and what it finally costs to put it down.

For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro, John le Carr , and Hanya Yanagihara.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GT5F3XDN
• ISBN13: 9798252777993
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 150 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"