As director of the State Department Crisis Reaction Unit, Judd Ryker gets a chance to prove his theory of The Golden Hour actually works when there is a coup in Mali. But in the real world, those hours include things he's never even imagined. As Ryker races from Washington to Europe and across the Sahara desert, he finds that personalities and loyalties begin to shift beneath his feet, and that friends and enemies come in many forms. THE GOLDEN HOUR takes its name from the hundred hours following a coup in which diplomatic action might reverse a chain of events.