Red Sea: A Novel

Four airliners are blown out of the sky---a devastating string of attacks taking hundreds of lives and striking fear into people and governments around the globe. Marie Peterssen, an ambitious young aviation reporter, has a hunch about the crashes, and her suspicions are confirmed when she’s approached by Julian Granot, an Israeli airline security expert and former Special Forces commando who has noticed her work.

Julian offers Marie a rare lead, one that will send her to London and later into the devastation of war-torn Iraq. With the help of a maverick FBI agent, Morgan Ensley, Marie stumbles onto the makings of a terrorist plot well beyond the destruction of airliners: the detonation of a rogue nuclear device in New York Harbor. The terrorists know that America’s most vulnerable spot is its transportation system, and they mean to exploit it. Time is short.

But Marie is in the grip of circumstances beyond her control. Julian’s intentions are unclear: Is he helping a journalist uncover answers the world craves, or is he setting up the girl to flush out an Islamic terrorist who killed Julian’s partner twenty years earlier?

Julian holds the key, but Marie’s role in the frantic race to unravel the plot grows when she learns that she may be tied to the terrorist leader in a more personal way.

Author Emily Benedek was writing an article on counterterrorism for Newsweek when she came into contact with a high-level Israeli counterterrorism expert. Due to his ongoing role in international investigations, much of what she learned in the course of their talks could only be told in a novel. What emerges from those meetings is a bone-chilling story of suspense, as thrilling as it is plausible.