The Closing Window

What does being right cost the people on the far end of it?

When a thirty-nine-day war with Iran ends not in victory but in a fragile ceasefire, the Meridian Institute - a Washington policy shop that has spent years studying the Islamic Republic from a safe distance - crosses the line from analysis into action. With sixty days before a vote can make the peace binding, its analysts turn every tool they own against their own government's settlement, and reach into the dark toward three people who could change everything: a Revolutionary Guard colonel ordered to turn his weapons on his own city, a labor organizer who will not stop, and a nurse who has seen what the regime does to those who do.

Each of them becomes a source. Each of them becomes a risk. And as the clock runs down, the men and women who recruited them must answer the question that haunts every act of conscience carried out from a safe room an ocean away: what does being right cost the people on the far end of it?

Taut, morally unflinching, and grounded in a startling command of how power actually works, The Closing Window is a literary espionage thriller for readers of John le Carré, Alan Furst, Joseph Kanon, and Mick Herron. It is the fiction debut of Gregg Roman, a Middle East policy and security analyst who has spent more than a decade at the center of American debates over Iran.

"A high-stakes thriller with a conscience - taut and morally unflinching. A rare story whose vital questions outlast its plot." - Jim Hanson, author of How to Win the Second Civil War

"Le Carré's heirs are many; few earn the comparison. Roman does, and then some." - Dexter Van Zile, Editor, FWI