Summary

"Plenty of breathless one-more-chapter, stay-up-late suspense wrapped around a meaty and timely story ... irresistible."

-- Lee Child

To find a Russian mole in the White House, an FBI agent must question everything. . . and trust no one

To save America from a catastrophic betrayal, an idealistic young FBI agent must stop a Russian mole in the White House in this exhilarating political thriller reminiscent of the early novels of John Grisham and David Baldacci.



No one was more surprised than FBI Agent Peter Sutherland when he's tapped to work in the White House Situation Room. From his earliest days as a surveillance specialist, Peter has scrupulously done everything by the book, hoping his record will help him escape the taint of his past. When Peter was a boy, his father, a section chief in FBI counterintelligence, was suspected of selling secrets to the Russians--a catastrophic breach that had cost him his career, his reputation, and eventually his life.

Peter knows intimately how one broken rule can cost lives. Nowhere is he more vigilant than in this room, the sanctum of America's secrets. Staffing the night action desk, his job is monitoring an emergency line for a call that has not--and might never--come.

Until tonight.

At 1:05 a.m. the phone rings. A terrified young woman named Rose tells Peter that her aunt and uncle have just been murdered and that the killer is still in the house with her. Before their deaths, they gave her this phone number with urgent instructions: "Tell them OSPREY was right. It's happening. . . "

The call thrusts Peter into the heart of a conspiracy years in the making, involving a Russian mole at the highest levels of the government. Anyone in the White House could be the traitor. Anyone could be corrupted. To save the nation, Peter must take the rules into his own hands and do the right thing, no matter the cost. He plunges into a desperate hunt for the traitor--a treacherous odyssey that pits him and Rose against some of Russia's most skilled and ruthless operatives and the full force of the FBI itself.

Peter knows that the wider a secret is broadcast, the more dangerous it gets for the people at the center. With the fate of the country on the line, he and Rose must evade seasoned assassins and maneuver past jolting betrayals to find the shocking truth--and stop the threat from inside before it's too late.

Publisher's Weekly Review

Idealistic FBI agent Peter Sutherland, the hero of this uneven political thriller from bestseller Quirk (The 500), works the night shift in the White House situation room, standing by for an emergency call "that might never come." Finally, he gets one from Rose Larkin, whose uncle and aunt, American counterintelligence agents Henry and Paulette Campbell, have instructed her to make a "night action" call and flee their house in a residential Washington, D.C., neighborhood. The Campbells possess a red ledger containing evidence of meetings between a high-placed U.S. government official and Russian intelligence officers, and a Russian operative is prepared to kill for it. Initially an innocent pawn in a game of high-stakes intrigue, Rose soon becomes a target, and Peter has found himself a mission. He's a sympathetic figure with something to prove (his FBI counterintelligence agent father was accused of being a traitor), and Quirk keeps the action moving at a cinematic clip. But Peter is too earnest by half, and those expecting nuance will be disappointed. Still, readers looking for a highly contemporary take on relations between the U.S. and Russia will be rewarded. Agent: Dan Conaway, Writers House. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

At first, this reads like something by Samuel Beckett. Peter Sutherland spends his nights 284 of them so far sitting in a little room waiting for the phone to ring. It doesn't. The phone is in the basement of the White House, and if anybody does call, Peter's supposed to tell somebody important. On this night, the phone rings. A woman's wavering voice: "He's inside. He's going to kill me." What follows hits close to home: Russia is planting moles in U.S. government offices as part of an effort to rebuild the old Soviet Union. Peter learns quickly that the people he should report to are treacherous, forcing him to go it alone, with some help from the frightened caller. Lots of good, tense plotting and wild action here, though, like a Mission: Impossible movie, it doesn't know when it's time to end. A real pleasure of espionage fiction is tradecraft secrets, and Quirk doesn't disappoint. Someone glancing at his dominant hand as he talks is being deceptive. Hydrogen peroxide, unlike bleach, will destroy DNA.--Don Crinklaw Copyright 2018 Booklist