Sky Vault

The Comet Cycle continues here with its third installment, set in the remote reaches of Fairbanks, Alaska, where strange weather has begun to gather and a government secret from World War II remains buried. Comet Cain arrived from beyond our solar system, and its debris carries elements no one has identified. Now an interstellar dust cloud is drifting through the atmosphere, and the sky above the region is bending and warping.

On a flight through a churning storm of dense, bruised-looking clouds laced with lightning, the sky splits open and the plane disappears, returning after only a minute. Everyone aboard, and the wider community, will be changed for good. Among the passengers was Chuck Bridges, a local radio DJ and conspiracy theorist, who was later reported dead to his family. Before that, he claimed that something inside the clouds had been speaking to him. His son, Theo, sets out to follow the trail his father uncovered.

Theo's search brings him into conflict with Sophie Chen, an agent working for a secretive employer that wants the plane's black box, and with Rolf Wagner, a widowed sheriff looking into a growing run of unsettling reports. Joanna Straub, a contractor restoring a classified government laboratory from WWII, hidden deep in the White Mountains, completes the cast. The origin of the comet is close to being revealed, and its effect on the planet will be more perilous and more awe-inspiring than anyone has imagined.