At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California—one of the nation’s premier nuclear-weapons design facilities—high-level physicists operate within heavy security to model and test new warhead designs. But politics can be just as dangerous as the weapons they design, and with gigantic budgets on the line, scientific egos, and personality clashes, research can turn deadly. When a prominent and abrasive nuclear-weapons researcher is murdered inside a Top Security zone, FBI investigator Craig Kreident is brought in on the case—but his FBI security clearance isn’t the same as a Department of Energy or Department of Defense clearance, and many of the clues are “sanitized” before he arrives. Kreident finds that dealing with red tape and political in-fighting might be more difficult than solving a murder. Written by two insiders who have worked at Lawrence Livermore, Virtual Destruction is not only a gripping thriller and complex mystery, but a vivid portrayal of an actual US nuclear-design facility.
Kevin J. Anderson is the author of more than 130, 47 of which have appeared on national or international bestseller lists. He has over 21 million books in print in thirty languages. He has won or been nominated for numerous prestigious awards, including the Nebula Award, Bram Stoker Award, the SFX Reader's Choice Award, the American Physics Society's Forum Award, and New York Times Notable Book. By any measure, he is one of the most popular writers currently working in the science fiction genre. Dr. J. Douglas Beason is the author of fourteen books, eight with collaborator Kevin J. Anderson, including Ignition and Ill Wind, as well as two non-fiction books. A Nebula Award finalist, Doug's short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and he has written for publications as diverse as Analog, Amazing Stories, Physical Review Letters and Physics of Fluids to Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Science, Technology and Society. Doug and Kevin's novel The Trinity Paradox holds the distinction of being the first work of fiction ever nominated for the American Physical Society's Forum award for promoting the understanding of physics in society, and was the first novel ever reviewed in Physics Today