Brian Andrews, the co-author of the popular Tier One military thriller series (along with Jeff Wilson), is set to release a new book called Reset, available in bookstores on April 24th.
Scroll down to check out the plot info, then keep scrolling for more details, including an exclusive quote from Andrews about the book!
A mysterious orb, a silo-dwelling doomsday prepper, and an ass-kicking Army wife fighting to save her husband all converge in this one-of-a-kind thriller
The human mind has always been unhackable…until now.
Deep in the Afghan mountains, Sergeant Michael Pitcher discovers an object with powers that defy explanation. After interacting with it, he suffers a traumatic seizure and is flown home for evaluation.
Cleared by the doctors, Michael goes home to his relieved wife, Josie. But he’s a changed man. The once-loving husband is now coldly withdrawn. After emptying the couple’s bank account, he disappears into the night.
When a team of scientists connected to Sergeant Pitcher vanishes without a trace, CIA agent Dean Ninemeyer comes to him for insight—only to find that the recovering soldier has also disappeared.
Dean and Josie must now join forces in a desperate race against time, searching for answers in an ever-twisting mystery. What they uncover is a chilling conspiracy that already has the fate of the world in its grip.
Obviously, this book is very different from anything else Andrews has written, and I asked him about that a few days ago.
“A few years after I finished my Navy tour, I was having dinner with a civilian (who shall remain nameless) who’s plugged into a group that gets involved in real-life X-files type investigations all over the world,” said Andrews.
“He made a strange comment, almost in passing that he’d heard the Army had found a bizarre piece of tech in Afghanistan while looking for Osama Bin Laden in the Tora Bora cave complexes. I asked him what it was and he shrugged and said it was carbon dated as very old but contained advanced technology. After that, he clammed up. Intrigued, I started asking around my network but came up blank.
“Next, I contacted a photojournalist who embedded with the 10th Mountain Division (the dudes spelunking the actual caves in May 2003), but he said he’d not heard anything of the sort. After hitting enough dead ends, I stopped digging. But the central germ of the idea stuck with me, nagging my author’s brain and not letting go. I started asking myself questions like: What if the Army really did find some kind of unidentified advanced technology in a cave? What could it be? Where would it have come from? What is its purpose? In brainstorming these questions, Reset was born.”
As for how the story and structure differ from his other work specifically, Andrews told The Real Book Spy that Reset is “different than any of my previous work both stylistically and structurally.
“It is the first novel I’ve crafted where the MacGuffin is a physical object. In the Tier One and Alex Ryan series I co-author with Jeff Wilson, the stories are driven by the character’s mission. In Reset, the heroes are always one step behind this “thing” they discovered. Every action they take, every strategy they use to gain control, only makes things worse. Another big difference between Reset and my other work is that this book has a mind-blowing twist at the end that answers all questions and erases all doubts that accumulate maddeningly during the narrative.
“The last noteworthy difference is something new, I can’t say I’ve ever heard of being done in the genre before — something I’ve dubbed a “paradoxical narrator.” Gillian Flynn made the “unreliable narrator” famous in Gone Girl. In this book, the character Willie Barnes (a former Missileer turned Doomsday Prepper) is a POV character who also can’t be trusted, but for an entirely different reason. Reset is a real mind hack of a book… I’m sure folks will have questions!”
We’ll have more updates, including a full review, posted to The Real Book Spy soon, so make sure to check back in the coming weeks. In the meantime, readers can pre-order Reset, the latest nail-biting thriller from Brian Andrews, wherever books are sold ahead of its April 24th release.
Praised as “one of today’s finest book reviewers” by New York Times bestselling author Gayle Lynds, Ryan Steck has “quickly established himself as the authority on mysteries and thrillers” (Author A.J. Tata). He currently lives in Southwest Michigan with his wife and their six children.