The Vestigial Tail

In the shadowed corridors of the Vesperia Republic, journalist Leo Vance is forcibly committed to the Mount Mercy Psychiatric Institute after witnessing a police killing tied to a web of medical fraud. Stripped of his identity, subjected to electroshock and heavy sedation, he wages a silent war to convince a lone, weary psychiatrist of his sanity. As memory fragments and reality blurs, Vance uncovers a conspiracy where greed is not a sin but an evolutionary residue—a vestigial tail that still strangles justice. Written in the metafictional, morally ambiguous style of Javier Cercas, this novel interrogates the nature of truth, the corruption of institutions, and the animal instinct that outlives conscience.