SECRETS OF STATE

Following his acclaimed debut The American Mission, Matthew Palmer returns with another gripping, all-too-real stand-alone thriller deeply entrenched in global intrigue and international politics, this time examining the world’s most dangerous yet overlooked nuclear threat: war between India and Pakistan.

Sam Trainor had once been a whiz-kid with a bright future, but a career of overseas work coupled with a penchant for being an outspoken iconoclast has left him on the outside looking in one too many times. Now he’s moving over from being the top South Asia analyst at the US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence & Research to doing identical work as a private contractor at Argus Security, a Beltway Bandit consulting company that provides the federal government with intelligence and analysis regarding developments in the Indian sub-continent.

But Sam soon discovers that for all their similarities, the government and private consulting companies have extraordinarily differing endgames. As he struggles to adjust to a more corporate version of the work that had driven him for so long, he stumbles across an anomaly in the intel: the transcript of a phone conversation discussing the fastest ways to upend the delicate political balance keeping India and Pakistan from all-out war. Only he knows that conversation couldn’t have occurred, because, among other things, he is having an affair with one of the participants.

As he digs into the source of this clear misinformation, he realizes more is at stake than just bad intel. The consequences of such blatantly wrong information trickling through the international gossip mill could lead the world into nuclear conflict. And Sam discovers his new employer could be knee-deep in the midst of the turmoil.

Matthew Palmer, author of The American Mission (Putnam June 2014; Serbian: Laguna), is a twenty-year veteran of the US Foreign Service, currently serving as Political Counselor at the American Embassy in Belgrade. A life member of the Council of Foreign Relations and a distinguished graduate of the National War College in Washington, he has worked as a diplomat all over the world. He is the son of the late, bestselling thriller writer Michael Palmer.