Conquest of Algiers (novel)

The eighth novel of the Rosewire series, Conquest of Algiers, consists of two sizable parts. Part one takes place in a fictional realm called the Maghreb, a composite of Hollywood North Africa and Arabia, following the exploits of exchange students Barnaby and St.-Pierre. Their misadventures mimic the contour of the first seven books of the series, and there is even a finely-detailed and animated recap chapter just before the turn (see: Rodonymatology), to simulate the contents of the eighth book up to that point. Part two recounts the students' route up along the Mediterranean towards the Portuguese rock of Gibraltar. Barnaby and St.-Pierre pass through Jerusalem and most of cosmopolitan Europe on their way to the Herakles Crisis. When they finally join the action of the black book, very little action transpires before Hunter 9 sets off The Bomb. The text ends in the middle of one of Barnaby's sentences at the bottom of a page; its verso and the remaining fifty pages of the book are seemingly blank. Later editions of the book have indeed left these pages blank.

In 2012, a new-generation Harry Hunter who goes by the name of Lavinia Flowers on the Harry Hunters website, posted that she had left her first-edition Conquest of Algiers in the oven at a relatively low temperature overnight. She showed her unglued book page by page in an online video, including fifty-one pages of brown text in invisible ink activated by the heat of her oven. Experiments with other first-edition copies show the same results, although most serious collectors discourage baking the book in favor of viewing the ink under a UV light. The revealed text reportedly sunk an AMC adaptation of the series.