A timely international thriller by the former deputy assistant secretary of state and bestselling author. When four American sport fishermen stray into Cuban waters and are promptly arrested by Castro’s navy, State Department crisis manager Judd Ryker finds himself called in to negotiate their release. But the more Ryker digs in to the situation, the more things he discovers that just don’t seem to fit, especially now, with relations between the United States and Cuba supposedly thawing. Who are these men really, and what were they doing there? What is Ryker’s actual mission, and what is his own government hiding from him? Some people want the new initiative to succeed. Others want to stop it at any cost. Still others see it as an opportunity for something much more radical. The common factor for every one of them: the time to act is right this minute. The ghosts of Havana are walking, and Ryker is caught in the middle of them all.

An extraordinary international thriller by the former deputy assistant secretary of state and author of the national bestseller The Golden Hour. In the life of every country, at a moment of extreme national disruption, there is a brief period of breakdown, when everything is uncertain, events can turn on a dime. That is the moment to act, to shape events how you want them to go. That is Minute Zero. Fresh off the harrowing events of The Golden Hour, State Department crisis manager Judd Ryker is suddenly thrown into a quickly developing emergency in Zimbabwe, where a longtime strongman is being challenged for the presidency. Rumors are flying furiously: armed gangs, military crackdowns, shady outside money pouring in, and, most disturbing for the United States, reports of highly enriched uranium leaking into the market. And that’s all before Ryker even lands in the country. It gets much worse after that. If he can’t get control, shape his Minute Zero, a lot of people are going to die-not least of all himself.

An extraordinary thriller debut of twenty-first-century espionage, by a former deputy assistant secretary of state who “knows where all the bodies are buried-literally” (W.E.B. Griffin). The Golden Hour: In international politics, the hundred hours following a coup, when there is still a chance that diplomacy, a secret back channel, military action-something-might reverse the chain of events. As the top American diplomat for West Africa, Todd Moss saw a great deal about how diplomacy and politics actually work. But as he shows us, the results aren’t always pretty. When Judd Ryker is appointed director of the new State Department Crisis Reaction Unit, he figures he has a mandate to help the United States respond more quickly to foreign crises, but he hasn’t reckoned with the intense State, Defense, Pentagon, White House, and CIA infighting and turf battles he would face. Then comes the coup in Mali. It is his chance to prove that his theory of the Golden Hour actually works-but in the real world, those hours move very, very quickly indeed, and include things he’d never even imagined. As Ryker races from Washington across Europe to the Sahara Desert, he finds that personalities, loyalties, everything he thought he knew, begin to shift and change beneath his feet-and that friends and enemies come in many forms.

A cutting-edge novel of international crime and its consequences, from Nigeria to Russia to Washington, from the former deputy assistant secretary of state. We laugh when it pops up in our inbox: the scam letter promising a windfall. We wonder: How does anybody fall for these things? But it is no laughing matter. It is one of the biggest organized crime rackets in the world, it is deadly – and State Department crisis manager Judd Ryker has fallen right into the middle of it. The disappearance of a young American in London sends Ryker into the heart of a corruption scandal in Nigeria, at the same time his CIA agent wife Jessica finds herself chasing a Russian master criminal known as the Bear. Unknown to either of them, they are pulling at two ends of the same lethal thread, a staggeringly vicious enterprise of piracy, extortion, and murder. The world is messy and dangerous, Jessica warns her husband. More dangerous than you know. But he is about to find out.