Part of NUMA Files, book 12
First published 2014
Kurt Austin pulls himself from the wreckage of a yacht rescue mission with his mind in pieces. The memories clash and contradict each other. In one version, he watches helplessly as an old friend and her children slip beneath the waves. In another, the yacht sits empty when he boards. Neither feels right. Austin refuses to accept the confusion. He digs for answers and uncovers something far worse than a maritime accident. Scientists are disappearing. Accidents pile up in suspicious patterns. A network of human traffickers operates behind a facade of legitimate business. State-sponsored hackers pull strings from the shadows. Austin and Joe Zavala follow the trail from the glittering casinos of Monaco to the isolated shores of Madagascar to the hostile territory of North Korea. They face an organization that treats human lives as commodities and national borders as mere suggestions. The deeper Austin goes, the more he realizes his fractured memories may be the key to bringing down an enemy that operates beyond the reach of any single government.
Genres: adventure, suspense, mystery, crime, thriller, action
Vibes: fast-paced, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: fractured-memories, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Monaco, Madagascar, North Korea
Period: 21st-century
440 pages · Hardcover · G.P. Putnam's Sons
Content warnings: violence