"Earl Emerson's plotting is original, suspenseful, and so well done that the richness of his writing seems almost a bonus.... He has taken his place in the rarefied air of the best of the best." She then calls from the air. And he watches from the base of a lighthouse as the plane, with eleven people on board, plummets into the steely gray sea. The man remembering this tragic event is in a hospital room, the victim of a bombing weeks after the crash. In this extraordinary thriller by award-winning author Earl Emerson, Seattle private eye Thomas Black returns after more than a decade and he must put together the shattered fragments of his life. His country depends on it.