The Watches of the Night • pitch
In less than a minute, Benjamin Hawken—war hero and Pritzker Prize-winning architect—saw his life, marriage, and reputation destroyed when the Monterey County Planetarium collapsed during its opening ceremonies, killing ninety-one people. Tormented by guilt for the catastrophe, and for the affair that he believes led to it, Ben sentenced himself to exile.
Long afterwards, in January 2001, the disappearance of his estranged son forces him out. Marcus, a young physicist, has uncovered evidence that the Planetarium was sabotaged and is determined to clear his father's name. With the help of his oldest friend, aerospace titan Ezra Furst, Ben follows Marcus's twisting trail—until his son is kidnapped. An inexplicable ransom demand turns the abduction into a matter of national security, and the ensuing firefight in the Mexican desert ends with Marcus dying in his father's arms.
Months later, Ezra asks Ben to design a massive Monument to Mankind in Israel's Jezreel Valley, near Megiddo. Convinced that a terrible fire is coming from the East, Ezra wants the monument to stand as a testament to the West. He is also doing what he can to prevent the catastrophe he fears—including a transfer to Israel of next-generation technology developed by his company. Ben agrees to the project on one condition: Israeli intelligence must investigate Marcus's theory about the Planetarium.
As Ben begins to design the monument, he struggles with nightmares and daydreams of Marcus that seem to be trying to reach him in some way he cannot fathom. And it turns out that Marcus was right. The truth of the Planetarium collapse is linked to the same forces determined to end Ezra Furst’s support of Israel, making Ben himself a target of Hamas and drawing him into a conspiracy that reaches from Israel to Rome and the Vatican. What began with a father willing to do anything to vindicate the son who died trying to vindicate him has carried Ben toward the gathering storm of September 11—and a mystery that neither physics nor intelligence services can explain.
By following in his son's footsteps, Ben has been led to confront more than the forces that destroyed his work. He will have to face the guilt that has crushed him ever since—and see if there's a life beyond it.
THE WATCHES OF THE NIGHT is an 86,000-word literary thriller that offers both the international reach and intimate stakes of Anna Pitoniak's The Helsinki Affair and the deepening metaphysical mystery of Danielle Trussoni's The Puzzle Master. The complete manuscript is available on request.