After the Rain

An ex-cop races to save his wife, their daughter, and the Minneapolis-St. Paul area from nuclear disaster in this thriller by the author of Absolute Zero.

Nina Pryce and her husband, Phil Broker, couldn’t have more opposite views of the military. Broker’s loyalty to the men he served with in Vietnam is matched only by his certainty that they shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Nina, though, is a new breed, a decorated and ambitious vet of the first Gulf War. As Nina proceeds along her chosen career path, Broker—until his recent “retirement,” Minnesota’s most effective, unorthodox, and controversial undercover cop—finds himself struggling in the role of patient military spouse . . .

Incommunicado for months as part of a top-secret Delta antiterrorist operation, Nina, with daughter Kit in tow, suddenly emerges in Langdon, North Dakota, a town in the heart of the Cold War Minuteman II missile belt. When Broker arrives to take Kit back home, he realizes that the legacy of those warheads still casts a sinister shadow across the desolate north border country, in the person of a damaged psychopath.

Broker discovers he’s been drawn into an elaborate con within a con, made an unwitting participant in a black-bag anti-terrorist detail. But his anger toward Nina for involving him and putting their daughter at risk quickly fades as a larger, more deadly reality becomes evident. With time running out, husband and wife unite with local North Dakota law enforcement to form a last line of defense against a brilliantly simple act of espionage with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Praise for After the Rain

“It’s an unbeatable combination: a smart, well-honed plot, fascinating characters (including a Lebanese sleeper spy, various local smugglers and a sexually deviant psycho-killer) and a writer with an original voice and the prose skills to tie it all together.” —Publishers Weekly