Introducing Blowback, an exhilarating new espionage thriller by former CIA ops officer Valerie Plame and thriller writer Sarah Lovett. Covert CIA ops officer Vanessa Pierson is finally close to capturing the world’s most dangerous international nuclear arms Bhoot, alias the ghost. One of her assets has information about Bhoot’s upcoming visit to a secret underground nuclear weapons facility in Iran—in only a few days. But just as Pierson’s informant is about to give her the location, they’re ambushed by an expert sniper. Pierson narrowly escapes. Her dead. Desperate to capture Bhoot and the sniper before they inflict more damage, Pierson enlists all of the Agency’s resources to find them. But with each day, the pressure of the manhunt mounts, causing her to push her forbidden romance with a fellow ops officer to its limit when she asks him to do the impossible. Despite the risks, she refuses to halt her pursuit of the terrorists, and she puts her cover and her career—and her life—at risk. With rapid-cut shifts from European capitals to Washington to the Near East, and with insider detail that only a former spy could provide, Blowback marks the explosive beginning of the hunt for Bhoot, the villain whom Vanessa Pierson devotes her life to capturing, dead or alive.

Covert CIA ops officer Vanessa Pierson has dedicated her career to capturing one Bhoot, the world’s most notorious nuclear arms dealer. That mission has been impeded by the murders of her assets, who were betrayed by a mole within her own agency. When she narrowly escapes death during a devastating explosion at the Louvre, Vanessa immediately suspects that Bhoot was the architect of the brazen terrorist attack. But when a previously unknown militant group claims responsibility for the bombing and promises even greater carnage, she is forced to rethink her initial assumptions—especially when Bhoot himself contacts her to deny responsibility and confirm her suspicions that a miniaturized nuclear device may have fallen into hands more dangerous than his own. Of course, Vanessa knows Bhoot can’t be trusted. But she begins to fear that a new and even greater threat to the world’s fragile balance of power may have emerged. As Vanessa’s investigation leads her ever closer to the identity of the mole and the real terrorists’ plans, she finds herself drawn against all her better instincts into a perilous alliance with one of the world’s most dangerous criminals—a man who has become her darkest obsession . . . and perhaps her savior. Moving swiftly from Paris, to Amsterdam, to Venice, to Istanbul, Burned is a nerve-shattering, intricately woven thriller about the mission to capture a brilliant and elusive mastermind—and an exhilarating new chapter in the Vanessa Pierson saga.