"Margaret Truman has become a first-rate mystery writer." LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW When a genius doctor is murdered and a desert madman gains the means to kill millions, Major Margit Falk, a helicopter pilot and Pentagon lawyer, is drawn into Project Safekeep--an antimissile scheme under congressional investigation. The alleged murderer has his share of secrets, but Falk smells conspiracy in the air. And although she turns to her mentor, law professor Mackenzie Smith for help, she's got to beat a cunning madman and a nuclear blast.... An Alternate Selection of the Literary Guild "TRUMAN 'KNOWS THE FORKS' IN THE NATION'S CAPITAL AND HOW TO PITCHFORK HER READERS INTO A WEB OF MURDER AND DETECTION". -- The Christian Science Monitor "Margaret Truman has become a first-rate mystery writer." LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW When a genius doctor is murdered and a desert madman gains the means to kill millions, Major Margit Falk, a helicopter pilot and Pentagon lawyer, is drawn into Project Safekeep--an antimissile scheme under congressional investigation. The alleged murderer has his share of secrets, but Falk smells conspiracy in the air. And although she turns to her mentor, law professor Mackenzie Smith for help, she's got to beat a cunning madman and a nuclear blast.... An Alternate Selection of the Literary Guild A genius doctor is murdered, and a desert madman gains the means to kill millions. These two explosive events ultimately draw Major Margit Falk, a helicopter pilot and Pentagon lawyer, into a maelstrom of betrayal, deceit, and danger -- and straight into the heart of the Pentagon's most precarious pet project. It is called Project Safekeep, an antimissile scheme under congressional investigation. Its chief engineer was the murder victim. The alleged murderer, and Falk's client, is a senior CIA officer and alleged homosexual. The smell of conspiracy is in the air, as Falk calls on her mentor, law professor Mackenzie Smith, for help. But it might already be too late -- because what Falk is smelling might not be conspiracy. It might be nuclear fallout. Margaret Truman won faithful readers with her works of biography and fiction, particularly her ongoing series of Capital Crimes mysteries. Her novels let us into the corridors of power and privilege, and poverty and pageantry, in the nation’s capital. She was the author of many nonfiction books, including The President’s House, in which she shares some of the secrets and history of the White House where she once resided. Truman lived in Manhattan and passed away in 2008. 1   The upper quadrant of a sun that would scorch the desert blossomed on the horizon, livid red and rising fast into an inky sky. Black-browed, graceful bedouin in kaffiyehs and burnooses who had not received the warning—or who had chosen to ignore it—fed their feisty camels and prepared to serve the Prophet for yet another day.   In a bunker dug into the sand, men waited and watched, their attention focused on a steel skeleton six miles away that jutted up into the now-brightening sky. They wore special dark glasses, and powerful field glasses dangled on leather straps from (heir necks. A bank of electronic equipment was in front of them, LEDs fluttering, row upon row of red, green, and yellow lights blinking. A stocky man in a military uniform the color of earth counted down, his concentration on a digital clock that advanced silently—and incessantly. Other men aimed video cameras at the skinny metal aberration in the middle of the vast desert.   “Minus two,” the clock-watcher said.   “Standby.”   “Minus one,” the keeper of the clock said, precisely one minute later.   “Cameras.”   “Rolling.”   “Glasses on.”   “Thirty … twenty-nine … twenty-eight.”   The bunker was pungent with anticipation. And fear.   “Three … two … one.”   It started slowly, a barely discernible rumbling of the earth. Then a brilliant white light erupted from atop the metal stand, its intensity reaching those in the bunkers slightly ahead of the sound. And in a second, no more than two, the awesome potency of energy equivalent to twenty thousand tons of TNT drove down and up and out—sending smoke and fire and acres of the desert itself into the heavens, its courier and its cap a mushroom cloud of devastation.   The video cameras captured every perverse second of the sequence—from the rumble to the fulgent light to the grimly familiar mushroom. Monitoring stations around the globe registered it on their sensitive meters. The meters and accompanying apparatus told a striking story. The Russians immediately knew the first fact. A weapon with the approximate power of America’s first atomic test had been detonated somewhere in the Middle East. Others knew, too. The Danes, the Japanese, the French … and several select groups of Americans, who converged like smaller clouds.   In the Hybla Valley Federal Building on Telegraph Road, south of Alexandria, Virginia, members of the Defense Nuclea