MAPMAKERS BOOK FIVE · AVAILABLE NOW

The Holy Land

Summary

A nuclear weapon detonates in Tel Aviv. Before the world understands who did it, Israel is preparing to answer with one of its own.

Across the country, coordinated attacks, radiological alarms, and reports of possible follow-on devices overwhelm every command system. A clandestine apocalyptic organization calling itself the Caliphate claims responsibility. Prime Minister Yael Ben-Ami believes another city may be next.

Before the world can stop her, Israeli F-35s launch a nuclear retaliation—and end decades of strategic ambiguity.

Now Secretary of State Alex Valen faces the first true test of the international order he helped build. The Caliphate must be dismantled. The Iranian regime that enabled it must be held to account. But Israel is both victim and nuclear actor: an attacked democracy fighting for survival, and an ally whose undeclared arsenal can no longer remain beyond inspection, law, or consequence.

As aircraft, inspectors, soldiers, police, and rescue crews converge across the region, the crisis widens from retaliation into something harder: who may wield civilization-ending force, what sovereignty protects, and whether equal law can survive when fear makes every exception feel necessary.

The attackers want a holy war. The old powers know only conquest, deterrence, and partition. Valen’s answer must be different.

To prevent the next catastrophe, he must destroy an outlaw without criminalizing a faith, remove a regime without claiming an empire, compel an ally without abandoning it, and force two peoples to confront the map that has failed them both.

The Holy Land is the fifth novel in the Mapmakers series—a near-future political and military thriller about nuclear terror, lawful force, and the brutal work of building peace after history has run out of excuses.