Judd Ryker

The Golden Hour: In international politics, the 100 hours following a coup, when there is still a chance that diplomacy, a secret back channel, military action - something - might reverse the chain of events. As the top American diplomat for West Africa, Todd Moss saw a great deal about how diplomacy and politics actually work. But as he shows us, the results aren’t always pretty.

In the life of every country, at a moment of extreme national disruption, there is a brief period of breakdown, when everything is uncertain, events can turn on a dime. That is the moment to act, to shape events how you want them to go. That is Minute Zero.

When four American sport fishermen stray into Cuban waters and are promptly arrested by Castro's navy, State Department crisis manager Judd Ryker finds himself called in to negotiate their release. But the more Ryker digs into the situation, the more things he discovers things that just don't seem to fit, especially now, with relations between the United States and Cuba supposedly thawing. Who are these men really, and what were they doing there? What is Ryker's actual mission, and what is his own government hiding from him?

We laugh when it pops up in our inbox: the scam letter promising a windfall. We wonder: How does anybody fall for these things? But it is no laughing matter. It is one of the biggest organized crime rackets in the world, it is deadly - and State Department crisis manager Judd Ryker has fallen right into the middle of it. The disappearance of a young American in London sends Ryker into the heart of a corruption scandal in Nigeria, at the same time his CIA agent wife Jessica finds herself chasing a Russian master criminal known as the Bear.