The Power and the Plunder — Sean A'Hearn

Two eighteen-year-old Texas girls are kidnapped while on a school trip to Rangoon. They end up with a brothel owner who buys the pair of 'butterflies' at auction and ships them to his ultra-secluded, Leisure Lodge. . .a pleasure palace deep in the Congo, for gentlemen of means with a taste for children. Laura Manning is the highly spirited and athletic daughter of a Jamaican mother and a Texas wildcatter. Her best friend, Jennifer Hoover, is the brainy blonde who learns resiliency in the face of overwhelming brutality and privation. Together they mastermind a bold escape from the brothel and find themselves in the thick of the jungle and the even thicker civil war where inhumanity is the rule, atrocity the norm. Treasure Ashbury arrives in New York City determined to make her fortune. She sets her cross-hairs on Jennifer's father, Alex Hoover, an alcoholic, suicidal entrepreneur who has all but lost interest in the company since the death of his nine-year old son and the subsequent divorce. With her rapier mind and towering ambition she ascends the heights of the NY real estate world. . .and finds the view much to her liking. Will Alex ever see his daughter again? Will Laura and Jennifer escape the brothel and if they do can they survive the jungle?