Sam Bleicher

Political pressure, corruption, romance, intrigue, and murder in defense of the UN Solar Shield’s 480 mirror system

Kelly O’Rourke is excited to become a officer in the UN Solar Shield Corps, which manages the system to help mitigate climate disruption. But she soon discovers inside and outside attempts to misuse the Project’s capabilities. She confides in Officer Jay Bhattachar, Commander Fauré’s Aide, about Fauré’s covert realignment of a mirror’s shadow at the urging of a Corps Board Member.
Faure’s action has inadvertently put the entire solar mirror project in jeopardy. Manhattan con artists have tricked a Wuhan computer firm into hacking the Corps’ master computer. They take advantage of the Commander’s action to pursue a profitable extortion scheme.
When Fauré finds out, he sends Jay, Kelly, and UN Security Officer Cheng to track them down. They follow the money trail from arson in Wuhan to confrontations in Manhattan and Moscow, triggering narrow escapes and clashes that put their very lives in danger. Kelly and Jay become lovers, but his moral concerns and appetite for adventure threaten their future.

This National Indie Excellence Awards Finalist puts global warming and climate intervention at the center of a gripping speculative fiction involving a notorious murder, a daring secret plot, and intense global conflict.

In the summer of 2020, Canadian RCMP Officers investigating the murder of outspoken climate scientist Ilsa Hartquist conclude that the motive was to silence her advocacy for a solar radiation management project to slow global warming. They are determined to find the assassins and those who paid for it.

With each passing year, the future that Dr. Hartquist predicted brings more extreme storms, shrinking polar icecaps, recurring massive floods, dangerous forest fires, and falling agricultural and fishery yields. But world leaders are paralyzed, as desires for short-term economic gain eclipse the long-term well-being of humanity.

Frustrated by global inaction and spurred on by Hartquist’s murder, diplomats from four small-island states—Maldives, Trinidad & Tobago, Mauritius, and Singapore—launch a clandestine solar geoengineering project Hartquist advocated, disregarding international institutions and procedures, in order to save humanity and their people.

Their scheme exposes a conflicting secret Russian project, causing military confrontations and forcing hard decisions by world leaders, as American and Russian UN Ambassadors struggle to avoid escalating the military and political crisis.