First published 1991
Commander Robert Bellamy gets a simple assignment: find everyone who witnessed a weather balloon go down over the Swiss Alps and make sure they stay quiet. It should be routine. It is not. The witnesses are dying before he can reach them, and the few who remain are terrified in ways they cannot explain. Bellamy moves fast, from Switzerland to Washington to Rome, pulling at threads that keep leading somewhere larger and more dangerous than any government operation he has encountered before. What brought that balloon down was not weather. What it carried was not instruments. The deeper Bellamy digs, the more he understands that the people trying to stop him are not just powerful but organized across borders and agencies and institutions he once trusted. Sidney Sheldon builds the pressure steadily, piling revelation onto revelation until Bellamy is forced to confront a secret that reaches beyond Earth itself. The conspiracy does not just threaten him. It threatens everyone. The emotional core of the novel is a man trained to follow orders who discovers that the orders have always served a lie.
Genres: science-fiction, adventure, suspense, mystery, thriller, espionage
Vibes: fast-paced, high-stakes, intense, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: conspiracy-unraveling, man-on-the-run, truth-seeking, unreliable-authority
Setting: Swiss Alps, Switzerland, Washington, Rome
448 pages · Paperback · Warner Books
Content warnings: death, murder, violence