Return to Normal

The Cold War never really ended. It just went deeper underground, and further into space.

When ex-Navy operative Keith Maddox is summoned to a war room in Tel Aviv, he already knows the situation is bad. Rogue Russian agent Nikolai Pronin, a man Maddox has been trying to kill for years is alive, mobile, and about to do something catastrophic. He's sitting on a cache of recovered alien technology powerful enough to rewrite the laws of physics, and he intends to sell it to the highest bidder before disappearing forever.

The problem isn't just Pronin. Deep inside a classified U.S. facility in Guantanamo, a self-aware alien intelligence, the same technology Pronin is trying to exploit, has awakened. It has been watching. Judging. And it is running out of patience with the human race.

With the clock ticking, Maddox is smuggled into Russia with one mission: find Pronin through his girlfriend, track him to ground, and end it. Meanwhile, Anna Fletcher; operative, equestrian, and the woman Maddox can't quite figure out, is deep undercover at a Saudi royal riding academy, running her own dangerous thread of the same unraveling operation.

From the ancient streets of Jerusalem to the shadows of Moscow to the gilded halls of a Saudi desert compound, Return to Normal is a propulsive spy thriller that asks whether humanity deserves the extraordinary gifts it keeps trying to weaponize, and whether two battered operatives can finish the mission before an intelligence older than civilization decides the answer is no.

Alien technology has been watching humanity. Now it's ready to act.

Perfect for fans of Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, and Lee Child's Jack Reacher, Return to Normal is the fourth book in the Keith Maddox series, following Sudden Storm and its sequels.

Clark W. Heckert is a U.S. Navy veteran, engineer, and globe-trotting adventurer who brings decades of real-world technical and military experience to his fiction. He lives in Redstone, Colorado.