Solstice

It rises in the east, casting its golden brilliance over the globe. Nurturing. Melting the winter snows and growing the summer crops. Until the strange days begin. Solar flares erupt and disrupt communications. The sun burns brighter, hotter, drier--until the giver of life and light becomes a rolling, teeming heat wave igniting pandemonium and chaos. But the weary, frightened people of the world do not know that the solar storms are only part of the story. An even more terrible truth is about to explode out of the shadows. . . From Japan to Spain to California, the most brilliant minds in science are scrambling to interpret the phenomenon. One scientist, a man whose life is in shambles, is about to be told the truth: Something human is causing the violent power of the sun to focus on specific targets--with enough concentrated energy to destroy the entire cities. Michael Lieberman has been contacted by the CIA's chief scientist, a woman frozen out of Washington's inner circle. Together they investigate how Air Force One has been knocked out of the sky . . . why computer systems are unraveling . . . how Las Vegas has been targeted by an electromagnetic explosion. Racing against the clock, Leiberman and Helen Wagner are hunting not for scientific answers but for one woman: the mastermind of a staggering techno-hijacking that has turned a raging sun into the ultimate weapon--and who is about to use it to the most terrifying effect of all. The most inventive, cutting-edge thriller of the year, SOLSTICE is a breakneck adventure pitting computer architects against military planners, brilliant eco-cultists against government agents, and US political apparatchiks against each other in an age of devastation and recklessness. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, in a season of heat and famine, death does not just come from a searing sky. It comes from the darkness of the human heart.