In the ancient world, people thought that comets were bad omens, signs of terrible events to come; in ROSETTA, a comet leads to a revelation that changes the lives of everyone on the planet. William is head of the Rosetta space programme, facing cuts in funding and opposition to his work. When the Rosetta probe starts to send back strange pictures and messages from a comet it has attached itself to, he sees his chance to convince the world that his work is of crucial importance for humanity.
But William and his team get more than they bargained for, as they start to find clues to a puzzle that goes back thousands of years, and that will take them to Japan, France and Spain on the trail of Isaac Newton and a mysterious French explorer. And the longer they delay in figuring it out, the greater the misunderstandings between the US, the EU and Russia over what has been discovered become, and the greater the risk of war.
