Dr. Lena Calder is the world's foremost expert on cults. She knows how they recruit, how they control, and how they convince ordinary people to surrender everything. Her knowledge is professional-and deeply personal. She understands the machinery of cults from the inside. She was raised in one.
Now she works to tear them apart.
South of San Francisco, a mountain retreat offers something the modern world has forgotten how to provide: silence.
Amidst the overwhelm of smartphones, digital addiction, and pervasive mass media, The Solen Center offers people suffering from anxiety, distraction, and stress a unique path to relief.
No phones. No talking. Only the body, the breath, and a focus on one's hands.
People arrive burned out and leave utterly transformed. The waiting list runs to months.
But unbeknownst to them, inside the therapeutic practice is a secret that turns visitors into future unwitting operatives-committing acts for some of the world's most dangerous people, with no memory of having done so.
A peculiar nineteen-minute gap in three apparently unrelated crimes leads Lena to the Solen Center. What she finds there suggests thousands of untraceable, unsolved crimes.
