Chinese earthquakes, Special Forces ops, big-league physics, skullduggery in the halls of power - here's one powerhouse debut. Troy writes stealth fiction, smart, swift, and subversive. Start it at nighttime? You'll be up 'til dawn.

-Paul Evans, co-author of The Rolling Stone Album Guide

Seeking to reestablish herself after a professional debacle, Katherine Murkowitz joins a small, eccentric electronics firm. The firm's sale to a Chinese company begins a whirlwind of layered deceptions, international intrigue, and subtle romance, as the potentially world-saving discovery of Keith Sutter, the firm's founder, becomes the focus of two great nations. Preparing to stun the world with their coming independence from fossil fuels and subsequent economic dominance, the Chinese secretly produce Sutter's solar-electric cells in an underground facility nested in the Qinling Mountains. Their excess purchases of petroleum as a buffer against an international reaction drive up world energy prices, capturing the attention of young Jim Newberry at the CIA. The American response, a Special Forces operation to deny the Chinese this technology, ensnares unwitting people and other nations to earth shaking effect.

The revelations continue in Emergence.