The Premise Behind The Eleven Minute Void

Every so often a premise arrives fully formed and refuses to leave you alone. This was one of those.

What if every system failed at once, everywhere, for exactly eleven minutes? Not a rolling blackout, not a regional outage. Everything, at the same instant, for the same precise span of time. And then, what if the lights came back and the record simply said it never happened?

That is where The Eleven Minute Void begins. The people in charge call it scheduled maintenance and expect the world to nod and move on, and the world obliges, because that is what the world does. The one person who cannot is Emilia Cross, a technical analyst who was watching the data at the moment it went dark. She sees patterns other people miss, and the pattern she sees in those eleven minutes is not an accident. It is intention. Someone did this on purpose, and then erased it from memory, and only she is still looking at the empty space where it should be.

Eleven minutes of coordinated nothing is not an outage. It is a message. The Eleven Minute Void, the first book of The Valkyrie Protocol, arrives August 15. Join the list at winter-mysteries.com for the release alert.