All Cry Chaos, a debut thriller by the immensely gifted Leonard Rosen, is a masterful and gripping tale that literally reaches for the heavens.

The action begins when mathematician James Fenster is assassinated on the eve of a long-scheduled speech at a World Trade Organization meeting. The hit is as elegant as it is bizarre. Fenster’s Amsterdam hotel room is incinerated, yet the rest of the building remains intact. The murder trail leads veteran Interpol agent Henri Poincaré on a high-stakes, world-crossing quest for answers.

Together with his chain-smoking, bon vivant colleague, Serge Laurent, Poincaré pursues a long list of suspects: the Peruvian leader of the Indigenous Liberation Front, Rapture-crazed militants, a hedge fund director, Fenster’s elusive ex-fiancée, and a graduate student in mathematics. Poincaré begins to make progress in America, but there is a prodigious hatred trained on him—some unfinished business from a terrifying former genocide case—and he is called back to Europe to face the unfathomable. Stripped down and in despair, tested like Job, he realizes the two cases might be connected—and he might be the link.

This first installment in the Henri Poincaré series marries sharp, smart mystery to deep religious themes that will keep both agnostics and believers turning pages until the shattering revelatory end. Anyone who enjoys the work of John le Carré, Scott Turow, Dan Brown, and Stieg Larsson will relish Rosen’s storytelling and his resourceful, haunted protagonist. Others will appreciate his dazzling prose. Still others, the way he bends the thriller form in unconventional ways toward a higher cause, in the vein of Henning Mankell in The Man from Beijing. In short, All Cry Chaos promises to become a critical success that garners a broad readership throughout the nation and across the globe.

Caught in a Three Strikes law that sends him to prison for life, Nate Larson negotiates with prosecutors for an early release in exchange for testifying against his brother in an upcoming trial. As part of the deal, he demands custody of his fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Grace, who’s survived a string of disastrous foster homes.

Nate studied close-up magic during his time in prison. He’s good, and despite her wariness Grace joins him for a touring magic show of New England. Nate’s actual plan: to spend a few pleasant months with his granddaughter then run alone to Canada in hopes of undermining the case against his brother, who’s been falsely accused of trafficking. Pressure comes from that direction, too, from the actual traffickers who have hijacked the family’s legitimate, though secretive, connections to Eastern Europe and the Ukrainian village of Kortelisy.

Facing certain violence unless he runs, distraught at the prospect of wounding Grace unless he stays, Nate must thread a dangerous needle. And Grace, learning to perform some magic herself, must grow up in a hurry if she’s to save the only person she has ever trusted.

The Tenth Witness, a prequel to the award-winning All Cry Chaos, is the tale of a man upended: a twenty-eight-year-old who rejects a brilliant career in engineering for a dark, uncertain one in international police work.

On the night of October 9, 1799, the frigate HMS Lutine broke apart on the shoals of the Frisian Islands off the Dutch coast. When the insurer Lloyds of London paid on the wreck, it took ownership and planned expeditions to recoup the lost millions in gold and silver. Nearly two hundred years later, after a series of largely failed salvage operations, Lloyds tries again–this time on the strength of new technologies and a strategy devised by the gifted young engineer Henri Poincar+(r).

It is late spring 1978, and Poincar+(r) has worked nearly to exhaustion preparing for the Lutine dive. Before the salvage season begins, however, he takes a rare holiday: a hike at low tide across the vast, muddy flats of the Wadden Sea. His guide is Liesel Kraus, who is smart, able, appealing–and troubled. She and her brother Anselm are haunted by a violent history that generates both rage and, as the directors of Kraus Steel, an enormous, corrupting wealth. The closer Poincar+(r) draws to Liesel and Anselm, the more warped life becomes until, finally, love and a death threat compel him to investigate what no one else will–aside from Interpol. It seems that pain as well as treasure can be dredged up from the past to reshape the present.