When a dogmatic ideology is embraced as the prime principle of government, fundamental individual freedoms become an unacceptable threat. Rufus Reed, a former British Special Forces officer turned controversial author, wakes up to find himself incarcerated in a CIA 'œblack site' prison, a secret location outside the United States and beyond the reach of normal legal and ethical conventions. Drugged and kidnapped from his home in Marin County near San Francisco, he has been arrested under the U.S. Government's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under a warrant procured with very dubious, and possibly fabricated, evidence. But his story is only the tip of a complex and dangerous struggle for the survival of democracy in the USA. Set against the background of the presidential election campaigns of 2008, An Unquiet American is a novel that defies convention and questions the very fabric of American democracy.