CLOAKED DECEPTION

A disparate group of crime solvers attempt to untangle a complex terrorist plot in Zahn’s SF thriller.

A tactical nuclear weapon has been stolen from a research facility in India. The news rattles the American president’s cabinet, including FBI director Frank McPherson, who oversees the effort to prevent that weapon from being detonated in the United States. Meanwhile, a top-secret set of invisibility prototypes, known as the Cloaks, have gone missing from a lab in the Bay Area, and the thief left behind three dead scientists. While FBI special agent Madison Talbot and San Jose detective Natal Delgado attempt to figure out who took the precious technology—and why—Angie Chandler, the wife of one of the dead scientists, finds herself the target of a hit squad in stocking caps. She narrowly escapes death with the help of private investigator Adam Ross. Meanwhile, on a Pakistani container ship in the South China Sea, two secret agents, known by the code names Ten and Eleven, embark on a covert mission at the behest of unknown forces. How do these events connect? What unlucky soul does a shadowy force want to kill so badly that they’re willing to kill tens of thousands of innocents along with them? Zahn’s taut prose adeptly builds suspense in this cloak-and-dagger tale. Here Angie, consumed by paranoia, finds an envelope from her father: “She scooped it up, closed the mailbox, and continued on legs shaking as much as her hands while she waited for the shouts of triumph or, worse, the sound of the shot that would send her sprawling to the ground in a pool of her own blood. But there was nothing but the same thousand strange noises.” Zahn’s skill in constructing these characters and their detailed, weaving storylines makes for an immersive and thoroughly satisfying mystery on a grand scale.

A vast, tightly constructed thriller that ticks down to a brilliant finale.