Detective Daniel Dillon has made it his life's work understanding the human mind. Trapped with seventy-eight other hostages inside a restaurant that has been wired to explode in twenty-four hours, he has only a short time to figure out the motives of this eerily brilliant madman who calls himself Abraham. Andrea 'Andie' Taylor, a romance novelist visiting Washington, D.C., is one of the other hostages. She survived a hellish childhood only to find herself embroiled in this terrifying situation in ways that even she could not have imagined in one of her books. She feels uncharacteristically drawn to the detective, but at the same time, she has to forge a connection with Abraham in order to keep the two men from turning a dangerous situation into a deadly, explosive one. Three extraordinary minds brought together by extraordinary circumstances, none of them sure who they can trust. It's a dangerous game they're all playing, a game that no one is guaranteed to survive.