Past mysteries reappear in this terrifying tale in which forgotten Cold War secrets make a disturbing reappearance, from a writer Stephen King has called “a master.”

On a clear October day, the American skies empty after hundreds of pilots refuse to fly, triggering a complete ground stop as authorities seek to explain an act of baffling coordination that the pilots insist was anything but planned. The pilots received disturbing, middle-of-the-night calls from their mothers, and each mother had a simple and urgent request: do not fly today.

There are a few concerning elements to the calls. None of the mothers remember making them—and some of the mothers are dead.

While the nation’s military chiefs and artificial intelligence experts mobilize in search of answers, a sixteen-year-old girl named Charlie on the coast of Maine watches a strange, silvery balloon drift across the water and toward her home—a place she loathes. Her father’s dream of opening a craft brewery on an old airfield has been a disaster, and all she wants is an escape back to Brooklyn.

She’s about to get much more than that.

Her new home is ground zero for a story that begins at a remote naval base in Indiana during the winter of 1962, when a physicist named Martin Hazelton discovered something extraordinary—and deadly. All Hazelton wanted was time to seek an explanation, but pressure from both American and Russian actors forced him into a perilous race.

Moving between the two characters and timelines, Scott Carson deftly weaves Cold War espionage with contemporary terror in a story that explains why #1 New York Times bestseller Joe Hill has declared himself “a fan for life.”