QUANTUM features Captain Calli Chase, a NASA test pilot, quantum physicist, and cybercrime investigator. Growing up just outside NASA Langley in Hampton, Virginia, she and her twin sister have long had their sights set on going to space. On the eve of a top-secret space mission, Calli detects a tripped alarm in the tunnels deep below NASA’s research center. She knows that there are no accidents in this high security, high tech facility and that a looming blizzard and the government shutdown could provide the perfect cover for sabotage, with deadly consequences. As it turns out, the danger is worse than she thought. A spatter of dried blood, a missing security badge, a suspicious suicide—a series of disturbing clues that point to Calli's identical twin, Carme, who's been MIA for days. Desperate to halt the countdown to disaster and clear her sister's name, Captain Chase digs deep into her vast cybersecurity knowledge and her painful past in search of answers to her twin's erratic conduct.
Patricia Cornwell’s research for her books is unparalleled for its full and total immersion in the worlds she creates. For her Kay Scarpetta novels, she became adept at a wide range of skills from motorcycles to firearms, ballistics and weapons, to autopsies, death investigation and high-tech instrumentation, and earned certifications as a scuba diver and helicopter pilot. And for QUANTUM, Cornwell gained insider access to one of the country’s most secret and impregnable institutions. She traveled all over the country touring NASA facilities (as well as Sierra-Nevada Corporation and Blue Origin), and along the way, she learned to spacewalk, explored the training facilities used by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and began working with record breaking astronaut Peggy Whitson.
The result—a 100% authentic world so vivid down to the last detail, that readers feel part of the scenes alongside Calli—from the claustrophobic utility tunnels that snake beneath NASA Langley to the glowing computer displays of Mission Control, as she works desperately to stop a catastrophe—not just for the space program but for the safety of the whole nation.
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