12.21

From the co-author of the two-million copymega-bestseller The Rule of Four comes a riveting thriller with abrilliant premise based on the 2012 apocalypse phenomenon-perfect for readersof Steve Berry, Preston and Child, and Dan Brown.

For decades, December 21, 2012, has been atouchstone for doomsayers worldwide. It is the date, they claim, when theancient Maya calendar predicts the world will end.

In Los Angeles, two weeks before, all is calm.Dr. Gabriel Stanton takes his usual morning bike ride, drops off the dog withhis ex-wife, and heads to the lab where he studies incurable prion diseases forthe CDC. His first phone call is from a hospital resident who has an urgentcase she thinks he needs to see. Meanwhile, Chel Manu, a Guatemalan Americanresearcher at the Getty Museum, is interrupted by a desperate, unwelcomevisitor from the black market antiquities trade who thrusts a duffel bag intoher hands.

By the end of the day, Stanton, the foremostexpert on some of the rarest infections in the world, is grappling with apatient whose every symptom confounds and terrifies him. And Chel, thebrightest young star in the field of Maya studies, has possession of an illegalartifact that has miraculously survived the centuries intact: a priceless codexfrom a lost city of her ancestors. This extraordinary record, written in secretby a royal scribe, seems to hold the answer to her life's work and to one ofhistory's great riddles: why the Maya kingdoms vanished overnight. Suddenly itseems that our own civilization might suffer this same fate.

Withonly days remaining until December 21, 2012, Stanton and Chel must join forcesbefore time runs out.

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