"He builds the most unhackable vaults in the world. She is the only one who can walk through his heartbeat."
Julian Charles is an architect of secrecy. In the Jurong bedrock of Singapore, he has completed his masterpiece: The Absolute Zero. It is a sovereign vault that requires no keys or codes. Instead, it recognizes only Julian, his vascular signature, his unique gait, and his resting heart rate of fifty-four beats per minute and his DNA mutation.
But Julian is carrying a secret far more fragile than the wealth he protects. He is dying of a rare neurological condition, and he is managing the tremors in total isolation.
Josephine Charles, a disgraced Olympic gymnast just released from prison, has spent five years in a cell studying her brother’s creation. She knows his vulnerabilities because they are her own. She shares his blood, his history, and the same progressive disease that is stealing her motor control.
To reach Julian, Josephine must perform one final, impossible routine: a three-hundred-meter crossing in a tropical storm and a walk through a vault floor that reads her very soul. In a high-stakes heist where the only prize is the truth, Josephine will prove that no matter how deep you bury a secret, family always finds the cracks.
About
The Absolute Zero
About The Author
Nigel spent two decades making other people’s worlds look real. An award-winning visual effects supervisor and screenwriter, he produced some of the era’s biggest music videos, among them Eminem’s first, building images for a living and writing scripts disciplined by the screen’s one commandment: show, don’t tell.
In 2009, a medical crisis ended that life and began another. Freed and forced from the 120-page screenplay, he turned to prose and discovered he could finally go where the camera never could: inside his characters. It was hard at first, the pain and the unfamiliarity both. But with his debut, The Absolute Zero, he found his voice: intensely visual and visceral, eloquent yet urgent, fiction you don’t so much read as enter.
Jericho’s Way, his second novel, began as one of those screenplays before he rebuilt it as a book, free, at last, to explore his characters the way the screen never allowed. The visual eye never left him; today, he also shoots as a Los Angeles photographer and member of the international press. But it is on the page, now, that he frames things most precisely.