What do you think?
Blood Will Flow: The murderous business of oil and gas
'[A] page-turner of a book' -- Financial Times
'Breathtaking' -- Jon Lee Anderson
'A magnificent, earth-shaking achievement' -- Andrew Harding
'Vital' -- Sally Hayden
'Powerful, gripping and rigorously researched' -- Jason Burke
'The most astonishing piece of investigative journalism I have ever read' -- Reader review
On March 24, 2021, in the remote north of Mozambique, 500 ISIS militants attacked the small, paradise beach town of Palma - strategically unimportant but for vast offshore gas fields that had attracted $50 billion in foreign investment, including over £1 billion from the British government.
As the Islamists surged through town beheading civilians, a group of men, women and children - including 80 gas plant construction workers - barricaded themselves inside a hotel to await rescue. An oil and gas compound defended by attack helicopters and 1,000 soldiers was just minutes away. But help never came.
Five years on, Alex Perry's spell-binding, meticulous reconstruction unearths a hidden and unprecedented fiasco. Woven into his account is a search for the truth about how energy companies really make their vast profits.
His investigation takes him around the world, from Europe to the US, and back to Africa again, as he tracks down the roughnecks, mercenaries, billionaires, and corporate spooks who can shed light on our most essential industry. As the revelations build and the lies multiply, Perry finds himself drawn into a legal drama, and an exploding political scandal.
Propulsive, prophetic, and arriving at a time when energy companies imperil the planet, Blood Will Flow delivers a morality tale for the global economy, and an inspiring quest for justice.
'Breathtaking' -- Jon Lee Anderson
'A magnificent, earth-shaking achievement' -- Andrew Harding
'Vital' -- Sally Hayden
'Powerful, gripping and rigorously researched' -- Jason Burke
'The most astonishing piece of investigative journalism I have ever read' -- Reader review
On March 24, 2021, in the remote north of Mozambique, 500 ISIS militants attacked the small, paradise beach town of Palma - strategically unimportant but for vast offshore gas fields that had attracted $50 billion in foreign investment, including over £1 billion from the British government.
As the Islamists surged through town beheading civilians, a group of men, women and children - including 80 gas plant construction workers - barricaded themselves inside a hotel to await rescue. An oil and gas compound defended by attack helicopters and 1,000 soldiers was just minutes away. But help never came.
Five years on, Alex Perry's spell-binding, meticulous reconstruction unearths a hidden and unprecedented fiasco. Woven into his account is a search for the truth about how energy companies really make their vast profits.
His investigation takes him around the world, from Europe to the US, and back to Africa again, as he tracks down the roughnecks, mercenaries, billionaires, and corporate spooks who can shed light on our most essential industry. As the revelations build and the lies multiply, Perry finds himself drawn into a legal drama, and an exploding political scandal.
Propulsive, prophetic, and arriving at a time when energy companies imperil the planet, Blood Will Flow delivers a morality tale for the global economy, and an inspiring quest for justice.
358 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 19, 2026
About the author
Alex Perry
45 books72 followersAlex Perry is a reporter and nonfiction author. He is the author of Blood Will Flow, The Good Mothers, The Rift, Falling Off The Edge, and Lifeblood, as well as several ebooks. His journalism has won numerous awards and has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Politico, The Economist, Outside, The Guardian, Harper's, TIME, Newsweek, and others. Among screen adaptations of his work, Disney made a 6-part series of The Good Mothers, which won the Berlinale film festival. Born in Philadelphia and raised in England, Perry lived and worked for 15 years in Asia and Africa. He now lives in Hampshire, England.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
August 14, 2026
This is a remarkable and powerful book, and one I would recommend to anyone; without qualification. It is primarily about a series of events which occurred from 2017 until the early 2020s around the tiny village of Palma in Mozambique on the east coast of southern Africa.
Alex Perry begins his story much earlier, in fact going back as far as ancient times. The story is centrally about oil but Perry argues that that story is entangled with colonialism and the dispossession of indigenous peoples. “Economists call the paradox of how a land’s natural wealth can be the ruin of its people the ‘resource curse’. If you consider that the curse is invoked by greed and routinely manifests as violent, acquisitive racism, you can spot its dark presence through history. It is there in Alexander the Great’s habit of taking gold and silver prospectors on his campaigns through Persia and Egypt. It reappears in the Vikings’ enthusiasm for pillaging English monasteries. It manifests in Christopher Columbus’s extermination and enslavement of the Taino on Hispaniola in 1492, an atrocity which foretold the curse’s fullest expression: the genocidal conquests of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas by Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain between the 16th and 19th centuries.”
So it is evident that no punches will be pulled.
In one sense, none of that backstory really relates to the Palma episode but, in Perry’s persuasive telling, resource pilfering follows a strict lineal inheritance.
In fact, it is arguable that the take-over of oil and gas reserves by big oil is more cynical and more unethical than earlier empire-building, because the present plundering is carried out in a context of more sophisticated historical knowledge and analysis.
The company at the centre of this story is the French firm Total, lately renamed as TotalEnergy, and the individual at the centre of Total is one Patrick Pouyanné, its CEO at the time.
The book begins in 2021, with a married couple Adrian (Adi) Nel and his wife Janik Armstrong. They live in Durban but he is in Mozambique on a job; he texts her: “Janik im still alive here but shit is going wild…” We are then given something of their back story.
Then the narration moves to Paris and the office in Total Oil of Patrick Pouyanné an elite engineer who is Total’s CEO after a professional life involving politics and mineral exploration in Africa. In 2021, he had been CEO for seven years following the death in an airplane accident of his predecessor. Pouyanné had a propensity for thinking laterally along unorthodox pathways. When a series of oil disasters occurred, the best recognized being the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989, these caused massive environmental damage which, in turn, led to court cases requiring massive pay-outs from various players.
Pouyanné responded to this context by presenting himself as an environmentalist, seeking to work towards independence from fossil fuels. That, however, would be in the future. For now, he sought to lead Total in responsible exploration and recovery, especially of the slightly cleaner natural gas. Companies could not afford the pay-out risks of drilling around North America or Europe, where spills could lead to catastrophic costs. So they focused on Africa where rules and laws were less rigid and lawmakers more … pliable. As Perry puts it: “while the chance of a Western world fine of tens of billions of dollars was a disincentive to invest, developing world corruption or insurrection, which tended to cost less, were not… Total could afford community programs to foster local approval. It could pay for a department of government relations specialists to bring foreign leaders to its side. Its lawyers could perform jurisdictional gymnastics to impose European or American law on contracts, while ensuring tax – or the lack of it – was handled in a haven like Dubai. And if things went south, Total's communications department would manage the company's reputation, while Total's security department, staffed by ex--Foreign Legionnaires, policeman, and generals, would draw on a century of colonial and post--colonial experience to defend the asset."
Pouyanné had a well-deserved reputation of being a micro-manager who trusted his own, considered, judgment ahead of his subordinates’. Some years later, we might find a parallel with a less informed, less considered world leader.
The gas field that particularly interested Pouyanné at this time was in Mozambique, where Adi Nel was working.
The book then digresses to early colonial North America and the discovery of oil on lands allocated to native American tribes. We are told of the paternalistic shenanigans by which the settlers defrauded the indigenous of a rightful portion of the profits of these resources.
This all contributes to Perry’s overall theme of colonialism being designed to purloin resources and of contemporary resource exploitation being essentially a new variant on colonialism.
The story then diverts again, this time to look at one Bonomade Machude Omar , a resident of Palma in Mozambique. Bonomade’s father died when the boy was young, and his mother remarried her brother-in-law. The boy’s tiny village had been entirely inhabited by the Mwani tribe, but his new father took them to a larger village with facilities like schools and bookshops and the internet. There were few Mwani there and those who were there found themselves with few opportunities amongst the dominant Makondé. Bonomade started attending school and was seen as diligent and earnest. He was also observant and saw the level of graft and corruption. He completed compulsory military service which taught him about weapons and discipline. His father sent him to madrassas. The strict Wahhabi piety suited his now severe nature. “The Wahhabis proposed a cure-all for the world’s corruption. The righteous response for those shut out by a crooked, Christian word, they said, was to reject it right back - not just the Mozambican state, or the great trough of sin that was the West, but their insidious inventions: democracy, capitalism, science, education.” Bonomade named himself Ibn Omar and took leadership of other disaffected youth, marauding through the surrounding scrub.
The developing interest in gas-fields near Palma brought together several of Omar’s hatreds: foreigners, Christians, ravaging of the region for infrastructure, the pursuit of fabulous wealth, the exclusion of locals, impiety. There was plenty to provoke a jihadist, and Ibn Omar became a zealous jihadist with a penchant for beheading.
Blood Will Flow outlines all the decisions, ideas, stupidity, contempt, ideology, greed, racist misunderstanding which brought the jihadists into confrontation with big European capitalism, with a number of accidental players such as Adi and Jannik caught up in it all.
The insurrections began in 2017 and are explored in detail by the author in the main part of the book. The evidence seems compelling that Total was wilful in ignoring the dangers faced by its employees, sub-contractors and local villagers and in refraining from establishing adequate security. Perry attributes much of this to Pouyanné’s dictatorial management, valuing his own poorly-informed judgment above that of experts and people on the ground. When the jihad was at its worst but some rescues and mitigation were possible, Total declined to be involved.
Perry writes that he spent five years after the incidents working with a team of investigators to interview people from the area. The conclusion was that thousands of people had died, and hundreds of thousands had been displaced; that, to a large extent, these outcomes were ignored, probably because the victims were mainly African. Total had obfuscated and obstructed both during the episode and in the aftermath.
Nevertheless, several international court cases were instigated against the company and these are presumably still continuing.
The book serves as something of a memorial for Adi and others who were slaughtered, but it is not clear that it will have achieved much more, unless the litigation is successful.
Rwandan forces were brought in and (brutally) recovered all territory from al-Shabab, and killed Omar. The holy war rather petered out; although Omar’s forces had plundered enormous amounts of food and wealth, “What they lacked was much sense of purpose beyond a crude, tribal intolerance. ‘They just said they wanted their land to be reserved for Muslims.’”
One’s sense of nihilism is fostered by Blood Will Flow . I am not sure how much I would go along with Perry’s thesis that the Palma debacle is fundamentally to be attributed to colonialist pursuit of foreign resources, especially oil. I would not dispute the lineage, but I think if we were to be completely honest, we should take a further step back for a wider view. At that point, I would suggest the extraordinary rapacity of the human species would come into tighter focus.
We see the greed of individuals and of corporations and it seems that the greater the power of either, the greater the rapacity, and the less influential the presence of ethics. But we should also remember that, these days, big corporations do not commonly feed their profits into the pockets of a small ownership group. We must also look at pension funds and at private investors and venture capitalists. At the same time, greed flourishes in the political realm with graft and corruption common in many regimes which are not well-regulated. And, these days, in some that thought they were.
The sorry story of Palma also reminds us of the role that religion can play in human debacles.
It is not conducive to a millennial optimism.
Blood Will Flow is not comfortable reading but it is well worth the discomfort. Its readers will be indebted to Alex Perry. (I should add that I was not a little surprised and was rather irritated that the book had no index! Why not?)
Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry for TotalEnergy, as it is now known, includes almost nothing of this story and there is not a single citation of Perry.
Alex Perry begins his story much earlier, in fact going back as far as ancient times. The story is centrally about oil but Perry argues that that story is entangled with colonialism and the dispossession of indigenous peoples. “Economists call the paradox of how a land’s natural wealth can be the ruin of its people the ‘resource curse’. If you consider that the curse is invoked by greed and routinely manifests as violent, acquisitive racism, you can spot its dark presence through history. It is there in Alexander the Great’s habit of taking gold and silver prospectors on his campaigns through Persia and Egypt. It reappears in the Vikings’ enthusiasm for pillaging English monasteries. It manifests in Christopher Columbus’s extermination and enslavement of the Taino on Hispaniola in 1492, an atrocity which foretold the curse’s fullest expression: the genocidal conquests of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas by Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain between the 16th and 19th centuries.”
So it is evident that no punches will be pulled.
In one sense, none of that backstory really relates to the Palma episode but, in Perry’s persuasive telling, resource pilfering follows a strict lineal inheritance.
In fact, it is arguable that the take-over of oil and gas reserves by big oil is more cynical and more unethical than earlier empire-building, because the present plundering is carried out in a context of more sophisticated historical knowledge and analysis.
The company at the centre of this story is the French firm Total, lately renamed as TotalEnergy, and the individual at the centre of Total is one Patrick Pouyanné, its CEO at the time.
The book begins in 2021, with a married couple Adrian (Adi) Nel and his wife Janik Armstrong. They live in Durban but he is in Mozambique on a job; he texts her: “Janik im still alive here but shit is going wild…” We are then given something of their back story.
Then the narration moves to Paris and the office in Total Oil of Patrick Pouyanné an elite engineer who is Total’s CEO after a professional life involving politics and mineral exploration in Africa. In 2021, he had been CEO for seven years following the death in an airplane accident of his predecessor. Pouyanné had a propensity for thinking laterally along unorthodox pathways. When a series of oil disasters occurred, the best recognized being the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989, these caused massive environmental damage which, in turn, led to court cases requiring massive pay-outs from various players.
Pouyanné responded to this context by presenting himself as an environmentalist, seeking to work towards independence from fossil fuels. That, however, would be in the future. For now, he sought to lead Total in responsible exploration and recovery, especially of the slightly cleaner natural gas. Companies could not afford the pay-out risks of drilling around North America or Europe, where spills could lead to catastrophic costs. So they focused on Africa where rules and laws were less rigid and lawmakers more … pliable. As Perry puts it: “while the chance of a Western world fine of tens of billions of dollars was a disincentive to invest, developing world corruption or insurrection, which tended to cost less, were not… Total could afford community programs to foster local approval. It could pay for a department of government relations specialists to bring foreign leaders to its side. Its lawyers could perform jurisdictional gymnastics to impose European or American law on contracts, while ensuring tax – or the lack of it – was handled in a haven like Dubai. And if things went south, Total's communications department would manage the company's reputation, while Total's security department, staffed by ex--Foreign Legionnaires, policeman, and generals, would draw on a century of colonial and post--colonial experience to defend the asset."
Pouyanné had a well-deserved reputation of being a micro-manager who trusted his own, considered, judgment ahead of his subordinates’. Some years later, we might find a parallel with a less informed, less considered world leader.
The gas field that particularly interested Pouyanné at this time was in Mozambique, where Adi Nel was working.
The book then digresses to early colonial North America and the discovery of oil on lands allocated to native American tribes. We are told of the paternalistic shenanigans by which the settlers defrauded the indigenous of a rightful portion of the profits of these resources.
This all contributes to Perry’s overall theme of colonialism being designed to purloin resources and of contemporary resource exploitation being essentially a new variant on colonialism.
The story then diverts again, this time to look at one Bonomade Machude Omar , a resident of Palma in Mozambique. Bonomade’s father died when the boy was young, and his mother remarried her brother-in-law. The boy’s tiny village had been entirely inhabited by the Mwani tribe, but his new father took them to a larger village with facilities like schools and bookshops and the internet. There were few Mwani there and those who were there found themselves with few opportunities amongst the dominant Makondé. Bonomade started attending school and was seen as diligent and earnest. He was also observant and saw the level of graft and corruption. He completed compulsory military service which taught him about weapons and discipline. His father sent him to madrassas. The strict Wahhabi piety suited his now severe nature. “The Wahhabis proposed a cure-all for the world’s corruption. The righteous response for those shut out by a crooked, Christian word, they said, was to reject it right back - not just the Mozambican state, or the great trough of sin that was the West, but their insidious inventions: democracy, capitalism, science, education.” Bonomade named himself Ibn Omar and took leadership of other disaffected youth, marauding through the surrounding scrub.
The developing interest in gas-fields near Palma brought together several of Omar’s hatreds: foreigners, Christians, ravaging of the region for infrastructure, the pursuit of fabulous wealth, the exclusion of locals, impiety. There was plenty to provoke a jihadist, and Ibn Omar became a zealous jihadist with a penchant for beheading.
Blood Will Flow outlines all the decisions, ideas, stupidity, contempt, ideology, greed, racist misunderstanding which brought the jihadists into confrontation with big European capitalism, with a number of accidental players such as Adi and Jannik caught up in it all.
The insurrections began in 2017 and are explored in detail by the author in the main part of the book. The evidence seems compelling that Total was wilful in ignoring the dangers faced by its employees, sub-contractors and local villagers and in refraining from establishing adequate security. Perry attributes much of this to Pouyanné’s dictatorial management, valuing his own poorly-informed judgment above that of experts and people on the ground. When the jihad was at its worst but some rescues and mitigation were possible, Total declined to be involved.
Perry writes that he spent five years after the incidents working with a team of investigators to interview people from the area. The conclusion was that thousands of people had died, and hundreds of thousands had been displaced; that, to a large extent, these outcomes were ignored, probably because the victims were mainly African. Total had obfuscated and obstructed both during the episode and in the aftermath.
Nevertheless, several international court cases were instigated against the company and these are presumably still continuing.
The book serves as something of a memorial for Adi and others who were slaughtered, but it is not clear that it will have achieved much more, unless the litigation is successful.
Rwandan forces were brought in and (brutally) recovered all territory from al-Shabab, and killed Omar. The holy war rather petered out; although Omar’s forces had plundered enormous amounts of food and wealth, “What they lacked was much sense of purpose beyond a crude, tribal intolerance. ‘They just said they wanted their land to be reserved for Muslims.’”
One’s sense of nihilism is fostered by Blood Will Flow . I am not sure how much I would go along with Perry’s thesis that the Palma debacle is fundamentally to be attributed to colonialist pursuit of foreign resources, especially oil. I would not dispute the lineage, but I think if we were to be completely honest, we should take a further step back for a wider view. At that point, I would suggest the extraordinary rapacity of the human species would come into tighter focus.
We see the greed of individuals and of corporations and it seems that the greater the power of either, the greater the rapacity, and the less influential the presence of ethics. But we should also remember that, these days, big corporations do not commonly feed their profits into the pockets of a small ownership group. We must also look at pension funds and at private investors and venture capitalists. At the same time, greed flourishes in the political realm with graft and corruption common in many regimes which are not well-regulated. And, these days, in some that thought they were.
The sorry story of Palma also reminds us of the role that religion can play in human debacles.
It is not conducive to a millennial optimism.
Blood Will Flow is not comfortable reading but it is well worth the discomfort. Its readers will be indebted to Alex Perry. (I should add that I was not a little surprised and was rather irritated that the book had no index! Why not?)
Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry for TotalEnergy, as it is now known, includes almost nothing of this story and there is not a single citation of Perry.
March 25, 2026
In 2021, Palma in Mozambique was attacked. The people living nearby TotalEnergies gas plant had hoped that the armed forces at the facility would help. Not only did they not receive aid or safety, they themselves were accused of being part of the attackers or at least abetting them. It's like a horror story- imagine being held in shipping containers at your work facility being tortured and executed. And you are innocent. Men were separated, women faced violent repercussions and unspeakable horror ensues. And Palma is all about oil were billions of dollars are invested by our rich and powerful.
It was so frustrating to know how companies, governments, media all let this sink to the bottom of the news and it sickens me that we all have a part to play in this. We are consumers and we should be on the streets protesting, we should be guiding fairness and humanity with our wallets. but we don't.
The French energy company Total and it's war crimes. A massacre that wasn't even a blip on our radars. The "collective blindness" us Westerners have because we need that oil cheap, we need our opulent lifestyles and if we see/hear no evil, then there is no evil happening - right?
Perry delves deep and in his acknowledgements and appendix, states that he used prize money from another project to fund his interviews and research for this investigation. He couldn't name all those that helped him to protect them from retaliation. This just proves the lengths investigative journalists need to go to. And other reason why this should be read and listened to.
What is it with the French and beheadings in history? Guillotines, and now machetes and the truth hidden. I know Mozambique wasn't a French colony, but it led me to look up how many countries are still colonised by the French. At the moment - there are 13! Like what? Liberte, equality,fraternite is just empty slop.
This audiobook left me feeling so disgusted at ourselves. How we as a human race can hurt each other and the environment. In this world of AI and truth being so hard to suss out and identify, we need more books like this!
It was so frustrating to know how companies, governments, media all let this sink to the bottom of the news and it sickens me that we all have a part to play in this. We are consumers and we should be on the streets protesting, we should be guiding fairness and humanity with our wallets. but we don't.
The French energy company Total and it's war crimes. A massacre that wasn't even a blip on our radars. The "collective blindness" us Westerners have because we need that oil cheap, we need our opulent lifestyles and if we see/hear no evil, then there is no evil happening - right?
Perry delves deep and in his acknowledgements and appendix, states that he used prize money from another project to fund his interviews and research for this investigation. He couldn't name all those that helped him to protect them from retaliation. This just proves the lengths investigative journalists need to go to. And other reason why this should be read and listened to.
What is it with the French and beheadings in history? Guillotines, and now machetes and the truth hidden. I know Mozambique wasn't a French colony, but it led me to look up how many countries are still colonised by the French. At the moment - there are 13! Like what? Liberte, equality,fraternite is just empty slop.
This audiobook left me feeling so disgusted at ourselves. How we as a human race can hurt each other and the environment. In this world of AI and truth being so hard to suss out and identify, we need more books like this!
September 7, 2026
Economists call the paradox of how a land’s natural wealth can be the ruin of its people the ‘resource curse’.
The beginning of Blood Will Flow did not hook me. The broader setup felt somewhat detached from the story I was expecting, and it took me a while to get through it.
Once the actual attack on Palma begins, though, the book completely changes. I was deeply engaged by Perry’s reconstruction of what happened - and increasingly horrified by it.
At first, I thought Blood Will Flow was an overly dramatic title, not necessarily representative of what actually transpired. I was wrong. Very wrong. The violence is brutal, and some of what happened is genuinely difficult to comprehend.
The beginning may have left me cold, but the central story is gripping precisely because it is so horrifying, and because it actually happened.
The beginning of Blood Will Flow did not hook me. The broader setup felt somewhat detached from the story I was expecting, and it took me a while to get through it.
Once the actual attack on Palma begins, though, the book completely changes. I was deeply engaged by Perry’s reconstruction of what happened - and increasingly horrified by it.
At first, I thought Blood Will Flow was an overly dramatic title, not necessarily representative of what actually transpired. I was wrong. Very wrong. The violence is brutal, and some of what happened is genuinely difficult to comprehend.
The beginning may have left me cold, but the central story is gripping precisely because it is so horrifying, and because it actually happened.
April 3, 2026
Would highly recommend
March 19, 2026
If you want to read something that's true, yet absolutely astonishing, look no further.
The story of the second biggest terror attack of all time (which most of us have never heard of) and how Big Oil brought it about.
Extraordinary Investigative reporting, which I've come to expect from this author.
It deserves a permanent place on university reading lists everywhere.
The story of the second biggest terror attack of all time (which most of us have never heard of) and how Big Oil brought it about.
Extraordinary Investigative reporting, which I've come to expect from this author.
It deserves a permanent place on university reading lists everywhere.
May 23, 2026
If I had bought this book out of interest in big oil, I would have given it 7 stars out of a possible 5 for its dedicated research and pertinent conclusions. But as I bought it out of interest in Mocambique in general and Cabo Delgado in particular. Alex Perry must be congratulated on drawing attention to the magnitude of the catastrophe and to Total's appalling greed and hypocrisy. But we learn almost nothing about the motives or context of the attack itself, apart from the fact that its main protagonist was Omar, a religious fanatic from a minority ethnic group. So many more questions than answers left this reader profoundly dissatisfied and wanting to know more: For example:
Where did Omar's followers get advanced weaponry such as RPGs? Did his gruesome tendency to decapitate his victims owe more to his jihadi ideology than to his RENAMO background? What financial rewards induced the Mozambican government to hand over its prime asset to a French company?Why was the Mozambican army (by comparison with the Rwandans or the South African mercenaries) so hopeless as to become part of the problem rather than the solution?
In summary, therefore: The book does well to enhance Mozambique's profile on the world stage. It is such a pity that, having done so, it tells us very little about the country or its people.
Where did Omar's followers get advanced weaponry such as RPGs? Did his gruesome tendency to decapitate his victims owe more to his jihadi ideology than to his RENAMO background? What financial rewards induced the Mozambican government to hand over its prime asset to a French company?Why was the Mozambican army (by comparison with the Rwandans or the South African mercenaries) so hopeless as to become part of the problem rather than the solution?
In summary, therefore: The book does well to enhance Mozambique's profile on the world stage. It is such a pity that, having done so, it tells us very little about the country or its people.
August 30, 2026
Blood Will Flow is not an easy read, mainly because it keeps collapsing the comfortable distance between modern life and the human cost of supplying it.
Alex Perry’s reporting on the Palma massacre in Mozambique is exceptional. Patient, meticulous and often horrifying, he reconstructs an attack whose scale was largely invisible to the outside world, then follows the money, politics and security arrangements around TotalEnergies’ LNG project.
What emerges is terrorism sitting inside a much larger story about power and incentives.
The Mozambican government needs investment. TotalEnergies needs the project to work. The rest of us want cheap, reliable energy without thinking too hard about where it comes from. All perfectly rational, until you look at who carries the risk and, ultimately, who ends up dead.
Perry plainly has a case to make about the fossil-fuel industry, and I would have liked more examination of the insurgency itself. That criticism does not do much damage to his wider argument.
Turns out energy security looks considerably cleaner when the blood is spilled somewhere else.
Alex Perry’s reporting on the Palma massacre in Mozambique is exceptional. Patient, meticulous and often horrifying, he reconstructs an attack whose scale was largely invisible to the outside world, then follows the money, politics and security arrangements around TotalEnergies’ LNG project.
What emerges is terrorism sitting inside a much larger story about power and incentives.
The Mozambican government needs investment. TotalEnergies needs the project to work. The rest of us want cheap, reliable energy without thinking too hard about where it comes from. All perfectly rational, until you look at who carries the risk and, ultimately, who ends up dead.
Perry plainly has a case to make about the fossil-fuel industry, and I would have liked more examination of the insurgency itself. That criticism does not do much damage to his wider argument.
Turns out energy security looks considerably cleaner when the blood is spilled somewhere else.
June 30, 2026
One cannot help but wonder whether the solitary anonymous one-star review - at least at the time of writing - originated from Patrick Pouyanné, TotalEnergies' long-serving CEO, or perhaps another executive whose role in the company's history Perry's meticulous research lays uncomfortably bare. If so, their dissatisfaction would be understandable.
Perry has produced a work of remarkable rigour and moral clarity. Exhaustively researched yet deeply humane, it confronts uncomfortable truths without ever losing sight of those most profoundly affected by them. Most importantly, it restores voice and dignity to people who were never afforded the opportunity to tell their own stories, ensuring they are not simply remembered, but memorialised.
Perry has produced a work of remarkable rigour and moral clarity. Exhaustively researched yet deeply humane, it confronts uncomfortable truths without ever losing sight of those most profoundly affected by them. Most importantly, it restores voice and dignity to people who were never afforded the opportunity to tell their own stories, ensuring they are not simply remembered, but memorialised.
July 4, 2026
Incredibly well researched and well written account of an act of mass violence that happened under the nose of an oil and gas giant. Highlights the inhumanity engendered by the fossil fuel industry, not just on the level of climate change but in the very real sense that this company created the conditions for this massacre and then stood by and watched it happen.
I had never heard of the massacre on Mozambique despite it being (by this authors count) the second deadliest terrorist attack in recent history, after only 9/11. I also think it’s telling that when you google “Total energy Mozambique” you have to dig to find any mention of what happened in Palma.
This is a fantastic work of investigative journalism.
I had never heard of the massacre on Mozambique despite it being (by this authors count) the second deadliest terrorist attack in recent history, after only 9/11. I also think it’s telling that when you google “Total energy Mozambique” you have to dig to find any mention of what happened in Palma.
This is a fantastic work of investigative journalism.
September 2, 2026
Absolutely Brilliant
I could not put this down. Like most people, I had never heard of what can only be described as an absolute tragedy, and one which could have been avoided but for the arrogance and intransigence of Total (the French oil and gas company) and, in particular, its incredibly arrogant CEO who not only failed to listen to anybody else but also denied the consequences of his ignorance and arrogance - remind you of anyone else?
I could not put this down. Like most people, I had never heard of what can only be described as an absolute tragedy, and one which could have been avoided but for the arrogance and intransigence of Total (the French oil and gas company) and, in particular, its incredibly arrogant CEO who not only failed to listen to anybody else but also denied the consequences of his ignorance and arrogance - remind you of anyone else?
April 19, 2026
Superbly written and meticulously researched, this is a page turner and an expose for the ages. Holding to account big oil, speaking for those who are no longer here to speak for themselves and for those for whom geography, economics and politics mean being heard is impossible. By far the best non-fiction book read in the past year.
August 14, 2026
It's fine. Takes a while to get going and often gets bogged down in the detail more than necessary, introducing a host of characters who either become redundant later on or are completely forgotten.
Description of the escape is good, though again somewhat confused with so many names and characters introduced at different points across the story.
Description of the escape is good, though again somewhat confused with so many names and characters introduced at different points across the story.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Simple superb. I got an advance copy and this book comes out next week - stay tuned for my Daily maverick review ...
May 11, 2026
capitalism sucks and no one should let a man run anything probably
August 30, 2026
4.5 ⭐ and horrifying
March 26, 2026
Outstanding
I am involved in business in Mozambique and the political corruption there is awful. Unfortunately this corruption is promoted, albeit unintentionally, by Total. The Mozambican people are being completely fleeced by Total and Frelimo and this book does an excellent job in exposing some of the problems. Really good stuff.
I am involved in business in Mozambique and the political corruption there is awful. Unfortunately this corruption is promoted, albeit unintentionally, by Total. The Mozambican people are being completely fleeced by Total and Frelimo and this book does an excellent job in exposing some of the problems. Really good stuff.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews