Outage: A Novel

For fans of Laura Dave's The Last Thing He Told Me and William R. Forstchen's One Second After comes a riveting thriller about an internet blackout that leads one woman into a web of lies and conspiracies and her pursuit for answers.

In the dark, nothing stays hidden. When the internet goes down across the entire East Coast, Rachel Farrell assumes it is a technical glitch. A couples therapist juggling clients, two restless teenagers, and a husband who has been coming home late and distracted, she has enough to manage without a national crisis. But within hours it becomes clear that this is no ordinary outage. The grid is down, phones are dead, and nobody knows why.

As the night wears on without word from Caleb, Rachel's unease shifts into something darker. Her husband is a Washington lobbyist whose biggest client is a Chinese semiconductor company now at the center of suspicion. When a woman arrives at her door demanding she search Caleb's office for documents, then physically fights her for a notebook filled with indecipherable codes, Rachel is forced to confront a terrifying possibility: the man she has been married to for nearly two decades may not be who she thought he was.

With no internet, no phones, and no way to reach anyone she trusts, Rachel must navigate a rapidly unraveling world alone--piecing together the truth about her husband, her marriage, and a conspiracy that reaches far beyond their quiet Virginia suburb.

The truth, when it comes, will cost her everything.