The Jan. 6 Protocol: A Constitutional Conspiracy (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798177714523)

The Jan. 6 Protocol is a novel about the quietest way to end a republic.

Hazel Fitzgerald, the first woman elected President, has one terrifying problem: the incumbent President had a stroke the night before the election. By morning, his vice president-who is about to lose the election to Hazel-is running the country. He has sixty-three days, until Jan. 6, before Congress certifies the vote and confirms Hazel as the duly elected President.

But the accidental President does not intend to let Hazel take her rightful place.

A manufactured epidemic. Sabotaged reservoirs. Robot patrols in American streets. A Swiss holding company that owns the President's daughter and maintains the machines inside the White House.

Every crisis buys the incumbent more emergency power.

And every honest investigator-a reporter, a CIA agent, a Dutch detective, a dam keeper-turns up dead.

President-elect Hazel Fitzgerald has until January 6 to prove any of it. She has no army and no agency behind her.

She has a Howard professor she shouldn't be sleeping with. A cocaine-addicted newspaperman two years from his pension. A burned CIA hand who trusts no one. And a twenty-seven-year-old detective in Amsterdam who pulled something out of a canal that she was never supposed to find.

One by one, they are being killed.

The Jan. 6 Protocol is about the quietest way to end a republic: not with a coup, but with a stroke, a constitutional clause, and sixty-three days of ordinary men protecting their own interests, at any cost.

The story is set a few years from now, in a fictional America of mandatory identity codes, dead glaciers, water wars, and machine infantry, where the transfer of power is still guaranteed on paper.

A near-future political thriller in the tradition of Seven Days in May, The Manchurian Candidate, The Plot Against America, and The Handmaid's Tale.

The final chapter is a blank page. You will understand why.