The Closing Window - by Gregg Roman (Paperback)

About the Book

When a war with Iran ends in a fragile peace, a Washington institute turns its own tools against its government - and the three sources it runs inside the dark pay the price. Literary espionage in the tradition of le Carré and Mick Herron.

Book Synopsis

What does being right cost the people on the far end of it?

When a thirty-nine-day war with Iran ends not in victory but in a fragile ceasefire, the Meridian Institute - a Washington policy shop that has spent years studying the Islamic Republic from a safe distance - crosses the line from analysis into action. With sixty days before a vote can make the peace binding, its analysts turn every tool they own against their own government's settlement, and reach into the dark toward three people who could change everything: a Revolutionary Guard colonel ordered to turn his weapons on his own city, a labor organizer who will not stop, and a nurse who has seen what the regime does to those who do.

Each of them becomes a source. Each of them becomes a risk. And as the clock runs down, the men and women who recruited them must answer the question that haunts every act of conscience carried out from a safe room an ocean away: what does being right cost the people on the far end of it?

Taut, morally unflinching, and grounded in a startling command of how power actually works, The Closing Window is a literary espionage thriller for readers of John le Carré, Alan Furst, Joseph Kanon, and Mick Herron. It is the fiction debut of Gregg Roman, a Middle East policy and security analyst who has spent more than a decade at the center of American debates over Iran.

"A high-stakes thriller with a conscience - taut and morally unflinching. A rare story whose vital questions outlast its plot." - Jim Hanson, author of How to Win the Second Civil War

"Le Carré's heirs are many; few earn the comparison. Roman does, and then some." - Dexter Van Zile, Editor, FWI