"Detective John Corey of The lion's game, Plum Island, and Night fall returns in a new novel about a conspiracy to detonate nuclear bombs in two American cities, setting off a world war of unimaginable proportions"--Provided by the publisher.

A top nuclear scientist turns homicidal, taking an innocent family hostage at gunpoint. Gideon Crew, a colleague of his at Los Alamos, is called in to talk the man down. But the standoff ends in an explosion of violence. When the authorities discover the scientist's body is intensely radioactive, and that he had recently embraced Islamic extremism, all hell breaks loose. Gideon finds himself charged with a desperate assignment to track down a rogue...

With his dying breath, Carl Venable, head of the CIA task force on terrorism and Jude Brandon's final link to terrorist ringleader Max Huber, gives Brandon a mandate: to keep his daughter, Rachel, safe at any cost. But Rachel Venable has a shocking, twisted past of her own, one that comes rushing back after her medical clinic in Guyana is attacked by Huber -- the same man who murdered her father and kept her imprisoned for months. Brandon and Catherine...