It’s the dead of night, and Professor Thaddeus Bartholomew is frantically crawling through a field to stay alive. With mere moments to act, he has only enough time to type out a text message-a name-before his stalker overcomes him. Later he’s found with a hole in his chest, shot with a crossbow, and burned to death. Meanwhile, San Diego crime scene tech Grace Descanso has gone on vacation with her daughter, but the FBI feels far from guilty about interrupting them after her name turns up on the professor’s phone. Grace knows vaguely who he is, but can’t imagine why his dying act would involve her in any way-not that it matters. The FBI won’t let her walk away; she can either join the investigation or become a suspect in it. Soon, political leaders and extremists will converge at the world’s largest agricultural conference, and all signs indicate that Bartholomew’s brutal murder in a field of genetically modified soy is just the beginning of something much larger than one man’s death.