Razing Beijing: A Thriller

Robert Stuart is one hard-nosed businessman. When he rejects the conclusions of the official investigation into the crash of his company's test flight, those who secretly perpetrated the calamity double-down on their Stalinist methods. The FBI are involved and they now suspect Stuart of killing his own employees.

Emily Chang is Stuart's beautiful, tenacious colleague and he gambles his career on her ability to decipher the complex forensic riddle of the crash. Although she discovers the secret that would vindicate Stuart, its revelation will deliver a death sentence to her beloved parents. Stuart's gamble is further in doubt once Emily's personal, expatriot turmoil with her Chinese homeland is revealed. The alleged industrial accident now blossoms with international significance.

Stuart careens through a maze of corporate ineptitude and half-truths before he discovers that their technological breakthrough--the Green Holy Grail, funded by way of environmental research grants--is about to turn life in America into Hell on Earth. Circumstances surrounding its theft from Stuart's company cause the FBI and CIA to doubt his veracity. Sowing these seeds of suspicion is Stuart's supposed friend, Paul Devinn, a man educated to hate America throughout his privileged youth and whose loathing for his fellow Americans he carefully guards. It falls to Stuart, an ordinary citizen, to prevent the brutal genocide of countless thousands, himself and his loved ones among them.

Stuart and Chang together pursue a clever, elusive conspirator along a trail of industrial espionage and bloodshed. The stakes rise to become no less than the determination of whose vision of world order prevails, and upon whose ashes that future exists.
Sidney Elston's debut thriller was edited by Simon & Schuster's Emily Bestler, whose #1 best-selling authors include Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, and John Connolly.