An inexplicable explosion rocks the antiquities collection of a London museum, setting off alarms in clandestine organizations around the world.

Lady Kara Kensington's family paid a high price in money and blood to found the gallery that now lies in ruins. And her search for answers is about to lead Kara; her friend Safia al-Maaz, the gallery's brilliant and beautiful curator; and their guide, the international adventurer Omaha Dunn, into a world they never dreamed actually existed: a lost city buried beneath the Arabian desert, where something astonishing is waiting.

A covert government operative hunting a dangerous turncoat--his former partner--is being drawn there as well. But the many perils of a death-defying trek deep into the savage heart of the Arabian Peninsula pale before the nightmare to be unearthed at journey's end--an ageless power that lives and breathes, an awesome force that can create a utopia .. . or tear down everything humankind has built over millennia of civilization.