In the world of espionage and terrorism, nothing is ever quite what you expect. It's always worse.

Beck Casey, the college-professor-cum-spy protagonist of the best-selling Final Epidemic, returns, now to confront the very real nightmare that that haunts every national-security expert today: nuclear terrorism in the American homeland. Joining him in Fire of the Prophet is a cast of faces both new and familiar:

• Jeffrey Connor, a rising star at the FBI's Counter-Terror Division; a natural leader despite his youth, he's tasked to lead a desperate hunt for an elusive "blue-eyed terrorist."
• Katie Casey, Beck's daughter and an ambitious D.C. lawyer; she is fiercely loyal, romantically - and unexpectedly - linked with Connor... and trapped both in a doomed city and in a hackles-raising relationship between father and lover.
• Fatma Huntsman, the daughter of a Palestinian activist and an American woman, now radicalized as a terrorist and armed with a nuclear device in a mission against her fellow American citizens.
• Dennis Littrell, a self-described "overly seasoned" veteran news journalist, looking for professional redemption through one last story - a story that might save his nation and the world from a devastating global conflict...or could plunge it irrevocably into one.

In suspense-filled progression, Fire of the Prophet builds from an opening set along the U.S.-Mexican border through the battlefields of the Middle East, and ultimately takes the listener to a looming Armageddon... in the capital of the United States.