Standing over six feet tall with flaming red hair, Morten Storm was an unlikely jihadi. But after a troubled youth in his native Denmark, Storm found peace and purpose in his conversion to Islam. His absolute devotion only grew after he attended a militant madrasa in Yemen, named his son Osama, and became close friends with American-born terrorist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Then, after a decade of jihadi life, he not only rejected extremism-he began...

"The new Sean Dillon novel, a knife-edge story of terrorism and revenge, by "the dean of intrigue novelists" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). "The bell tolls at midnight as death requires it." In Washington, D.C., on a night full of rain, a woman is struck down and killed by a hit-and-run driver. But she is not just any woman--she is the assistant to the head of the secret White House department known only as the Basement. And she had secrets of her own....

Several "pieces first published in The New Yorker recall the path terror in the Middle East has taken from the rise of al-Qaeda in the 1990s to the recent beheadings of reporters and aid workers by ISIS ... They include an ... impression of Saudi Arabia, a kingdom of silence under the control of the religious police; the Syrian film industry, then compliant at the edges but already exuding a feeling of the barely masked fury that erupted into civil...