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DEPARTURE 37

Scott Carson

A Novel

Horror meets coming-of-age in this thrilling novel in which forgotten Cold War mysteries make a terrifying reappearance, from a writer Stephen King has called "a master."
On a clear October day, the American skies empty after hundreds of pilots refuse to fly, triggering a complete ground stop as authorities seek to explain an act of baffling coordination that the pilots insist was anything but planned. The pilots received disturbing, middle-of-the-night calls from their mothers, and each mother had a simple and urgent request: do not fly today.

There are a few concerning elements to the calls. None of the mothers remember making themand some of the mothers are dead.

While the nation's military chiefs and artificial intelligence experts mobilize in search of answers, a sixteen-year-old girl named Charlie on the coast of Maine watches a strange, silvery balloon drift across the water and toward her home - a place she loathes. Her father's dream of opening a craft brewery on an old airfield has been a disaster, and all she wants is an escape back to Brooklyn.

She's about to get much more than that.

Her new home is ground zero for a story that begins at a remote naval base in Indiana during the winter of 1962, when a physicist named Martin Hazelton discovered something extraordinary and deadly. All Hazelton wanted was time to seek an explanation, but pressure from both American and Russian actors forced him into a perilous race.

Moving between the two characters and timelines, Scott Carson deftly weaves Cold War espionage with contemporary terror in a story that explains why #1 New York Times bestseller Joe Hill has declared himself "a fan for life."

Scott Carson is the pseudonym of Michael Koryta, a New York Times bestselling author whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages, adapted into major motion pictures, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A former private investigator and reporter, his writing has been praised by Stephen King, Michael Connelly, and Dean Koontz, among many others. Raised in Bloomington, Indiana, he now lives in Indiana and Maine.
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Published 2025-04-29 by Atria/ Emily Bestler Books

Comments

Scott Carson is one of those rare writers who can grab you on page one, dive deep into his characters, keep you breathless with suspense, and do it all with gorgeous, propulsive prose. The past mingles with the present and the frightening future of technology in DEPARTURE 37, as Carson deftly weaves history, espionage, and horror into something totally unique, and utterly enthralling.

UK: Avon

Here's a time-travel story that's straight out of The Twilight Zone -- a coming-of-age novel filled with secret government conspiracies, Cold War intrigue, and missing nuclear weapons. Like Rod Serling and Richard Matheson, Scott Carson has a gift for making the most fantastical situations seem entirely plausible, and I was holding my breath throughout this novel's exhilarating sky-high climax.

If you loved THE TWILIGHT ZONE, this is for you. It's a mind-blower.

Wildly imaginative and genuinely, nailbitingly suspenseful.

Carson, delivers a terrific blend of horror and espionage . . . frighteningly real.

DEPARTURE 37 is one of the smartest thrillers I've ever read. Scott Carson brilliantly revives Cold War secretstensions and innovations, fears and mysteriesand propels them into the modern day. From nuclear laboratories to a remote peninsula in coastal Maine, DEPARTURE 37 delivers a story that is as globally thrilling as it is personally uplifting.

In this striking thriller, Carson nimbly entwines a contemporary coming-of-age story with a tale of Cold War paranoia. It's a winner.

DEPARTURE 37 is a rollicking, and at times terrifying, machup of the 20th and 21st century political, nuclear, and technological tensions and ambitions. It's smart, inventive, breathlessly paced, and most importantly, humane.