Sentinel Zero: Before the First Shot (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798186656449)

Some wars are declared. The worst ones are built.

Maya Strickland spent fifteen years as a United Nations crisis negotiator, walking into rooms no one else would enter - until a rescue in Mali collapsed in a failure of the compartments that were supposed to keep everyone alive, and she walked out carrying names she couldn't put down.

Now a covert American program wants her for what it can't do itself. Sentinel Division has no building, no budget, no oversight - and a single premise: that the wars of the coming century won't be declared, they'll be manufactured, engineered out of disinformation and manipulated fear, and that the only way to stop a manufactured war is to reach the people building it before the first shot makes it real.

Two invented republics are being pushed toward a border war neither population wants. The trigger is waiting. And as Maya races to reach the human being at the center of the machine, she discovers that Sentinel's tools for preventing a war are identical to the tools for starting one - and that the man she's hunting was once the closest thing her new director ever had to a partner.

The first thriller in a new series by a former United Nations director. Taut, morally complex, and built on a chilling question: when the tools to save the world and the tools to seize it are the same, the only thing that matters is who's holding them - and whether anyone is watching.