The Golden Hour: In international politics, the hundred hours following a coup, when there is still a chance that diplomacy, a secret back channel, military action --- something --- may reverse the chain of events.

As the director of the new State Department Crisis Reaction Unit, Judd Ryker gets a chance to prove that his theory of the Golden Hour actually works, when there’s a coup in Mali. But in the real world, those hours include things he’s never even imagined.

As Ryker races from Washington to Europe and across the Sahara Desert, he finds that personalities, loyalties --- everything he thought he knew --- begin to shift beneath his feet, and that friends and enemies come in many forms.