Departure 37

“If you loved The Twilight Zone, this is for you. It's a mind-blower.” —Stephen King Forgotten Cold War mysteries make a terrifying reappearance in this “totally unique and utterly enthralling” (Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author) thriller. On a clear October day, the American skies empty after hundreds of pilots refuse to fly, triggering a complete ground stop as authorities seek to explain an act of baffling coordination that the pilots insist was not planned. While the nation’s military chiefs and artificial intelligence experts mobilize in search of answers, a sixteen-year-old girl named Charlie on the coast of Maine watches a strange silvery balloon drift across the water and toward her new home—a place she loathes. All she wants is to escape back to Brooklyn. She’s about to get much more than that. Her new home is ground zero for a story that begins at a remote naval base in Indiana during the winter of 1962, when a physicist named Martin Hazelton discovered something extraordinary—and deadly. Experimentation with it was in process when the pressure of the Cold War forced his hand, and his discovery became literally ahead of its time.