Something New from Christie Winter: Introducing The Valkyrie Protocol

For two series, my conspiracies have lived in the past. The Archivist's Code followed a cipher hidden in five hundred years of manuscripts. The Ambush Files traced a frame-up through old intelligence files and footage that never happened. In both, the method is the same: find the thread, pull it backward through history, and watch the truth come loose.

My new series does something I have wanted to try for a long time. It sets the conspiracy in the present, in the systems all of us depend on and almost none of us think about. The power grid. The networks. The vast, invisible machinery that quietly decides what is recorded, what is trusted, and what is allowed to be called real.

The Valkyrie Protocol begins on August 15 with Book 1, The Eleven Minute Void.

Its heroine is Emilia Cross, a financial systems analyst with a gift I have always found fascinating: she sees patterns other people cannot. Where everyone else sees noise, she sees a shape. And one ordinary afternoon, the shape she sees in the data is something she was never meant to notice, right before every system in the world goes dark for exactly eleven minutes.

I am not going to tell you what those eleven minutes are. That is the whole book. What I will tell you is that when the lights come back, the official record insists nothing happened at all, and Emilia is the only person who knows better.

The Eleven Minute Void arrives August 15. If you want to be there on day one, join the list at winter-mysteries.com for the release alert.