Arthur Cathcart

Imagine this: You have a nice life. You love your beautiful, successful wife. You're an easygoing guy working out of your comfortable Connecticut home. The world is an interesting, pleasant place. Then in seconds, it's all gone. You're still alive, but the world thinks you're dead. And now you have to decide: make it official, or go after the evil that took it all away from you. Arthur Cathcart, market researcher and occasional finder of missing persons, decides to live on and fight by doing what he knows best—figuring things out without revealing his status as a living, breathing human being. Much easier said than done in the post-9/11 world, where everything about yourself and all the tools you need to live a modern life are an open book. How do you become a different person? How do you finance an elaborate scheme without revealing yourself? How, as a dead man, do you force a reckoning with the worst people on earth? Mystery writer Chris Knopf, who has examined complex what-ifs in eight other novels, tackles these intriguing questions in a tale of mindless venality, phantom identity, impossible obstacles, and the triumph of intellect and imagination over brute force.

When market researcher Arthur Cathcart emerged from a coma and set out to track down whoever murdered his wife, the results were far from preordained. Wounded and alone, grief stricken and hiding off the grid, he thought the only mystery was who killed Florencia-and why. But the quest for justice uncovers a host of fresh mysteries, beginning with an elaborate fraud and embezzlement scheme, complete with dummy corporations and offshore numbered accounts. In place of "who killed Florencia?" he was forced to ask "who was Florencia?" There was nothing about their lives together that answered this or any of a thousand questions she left behind. All he really knew was that she came from Chile, had a knack for figures, and owned her own insurance agency. So Arthur takes off again to do what he does best: find out stuff. What follows is a chase around the world, from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean and remote points north and south. Armed with a portfolio of false identities, hard-learned tradecraft, and the continued cloak of anonymity, Cathcart, now with Natsumi Fitzgerald at his side, plunges into the world of international terrorism and government intrigue, where the currency is betrayal and the rewards are calculated in blood and revenge.

Arthur Cathcart and Natsumi Fitzgerald wanted to believe they were free of the nearly invisible, malignant forces they had pursued, and been pursued by, across continents and oceans. The slightly brain-damaged tech-freak researcher and the blackjack-dealing psychologist had convinced themselves that life aboard a sailboat in the Caribbean, incognito and in love, could be a lasting refuge. The death of that illusion was as brutal as it was abrupt. Even people who knew how to dodge ruthless outlaws and relentless law enforcement learned there were powers from which no one could ever hide-not in the twenty-first century, not if you wanted more than to simply exist. To truly live in the world, you had to have a world that allows you to live. Soldiers fighting in Vietnam had a saying when pinned down under enemy fire: The only way out is through. And so it is that Arthur and Natsumi take to the fight, where the full expanse of both the virtual and material worlds is the field of engagement, nearly blind to the threats that surround them yet searching for that impossible path back to the ordinary lives they'd been forced to abandon. Wiser, stronger, and more experienced in the art of clandestine combat than they ever imagined they'd be, Arthur and Natsumi understand what makes you strong can also get you killed in a hurry-that the reserves of resilience and determination aren't limitless, that the power of intellect and craft dwindles in the face of a pitiless and resolute foe, that there are a billion ways to die but only one way to live.