Nudge Toward The Abyss

Some Decisions Are Too Important For Democracy. Sean North is twenty-two years old, newly graduated, and good at his job. Good enough that the wrong people noticed.When a shadowy organization called the National Continuity of Government Advisory Committee  or "e;The Committee"e; hires Sean as a cybersecurity analyst, they aren't interested in his résumé. They're interested in his friendship with Raza Rind — whose father commands India's nuclear arsenal. For eight years the Committee has been unable to breach India's most hardened defense networks. Sean North, and the trust his friend would extend without question, is the delivery mechanism they couldn't build themselves.The Committee's plan is called Early Winter. A limited nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, precisely engineered to trigger atmospheric cooling and buy a warming planet a decade of breathing room. Eight hundred million casualties, by their own projection. The lesser harm, by their own math.Sean doesn't know any of this. He thinks he has a job.Nudge Toward the Abyss follows five interlocking storylines converging on a single crisis: Sean's race to stop an operation he didn't know he was inside; President Terrence Lancaster, sworn in forty minutes after his predecessor is killed on approach to Minneapolis, inheriting a secret he wasn't meant to know; Secretary of State Cynthia Ballard, building diplomatic relationships she doesn't yet understand she'll need; FBI financial crimes agent Angela Carter, following a money trail that leads somewhere no one anticipated; and Mike Salizar, the Committee's most capable instrument, who draws one final line.What makes Nudge Toward the Abyss different from the conventional political thriller is that its villains are not wrong about the problem. They are wrong about the solution — and the distance between those two things is where the book lives.At its center is a question that refuses easy answers: how close does the world have to be to catastrophe before the people who understand it are justified in doing something the rest of the world hasn't consented to?The answer arrives with eleven minutes to spare.