In a far-flung Tibetan village, prayer flags flap against whitewashed houses and a majestic monastery stretches to heaven. It’s Shangri-La–the earthly paradise–until a stranger staggers out of the forest and collapses into a bloody, lifeless mass. He’s the first victim of a crippling epidemic, but he’s no ordinary man. Olen Grave, an American intelligence officer, heads directly into the hot zone to investigate. Posing as a journalist, he joins a Chinese research team led by a headstrong female virus hunter, Dr. Zhou Weilin. Together, the unlikely allies discover that Patient Zero was a spy who deliberately infected himself. But why? Who did he work for? As Olen and Jo rush to uncover the shocking truth behind the epidemic, they unravel a twisted conspiracy that reaches from Beijing’s great halls to Washington’s corridors of power. With the superpowers now at the brink of war, the fate of the world will rest on the duo’s shoulders.

Special Agent Vera Taggart walked away from a promising career as an artist to join the FBI, and she impresses her new colleagues with her eerie ability to divine conclusions from the grisliest crime scenes. Taggart’s first assignment is a decades-old cold case centered on a cult of suicide bombers known as the Sons of Elijah who believe they’ve been reborn hundreds of times. It seems like a low-risk assignment until a bomb tears apart a crowded restaurant. The Sons of Elijah have returned–and now it’s up to Taggart to stop their modern-day reign of terror. Taggart’s investigation begins with Dr. Seth Jacobson, a renowned psychiatrist who claims to help people remember past lives through hypnotherapy. Jacobson had treated two of the Sons of Elijah’s founders before they’d gone on to commit a series of horrific murders. Desperate to understand how these ordinary patients could have taken such a violent path, Taggart agrees to undergo similar treatment with Jacobson. Through her hypnosis sessions, Taggart comes to suspect the Sons of Elijah are targeting a high-tech government laboratory that could expose the group’s greatest secret with a controversial experiment. To save millions of innocent lives, she must come to grips with the shocking truth about the cult and her own puzzling role in its timeless mission. The fate of humanity rests on her ability to determine which threats are real and which exist only in her mind–and to decide whose side she’s really fighting for.