Link [SIGNED COPY, FIRST PRINTING]

There's a tantalizing triangle at the heart of this drama: Samantha, a beautiful, ambitious field paleontologist; Jack, a renegade scholar with a checkered past that includes both Samantha and some off-the-wall evolutionary theories; and Dorn, Samantha's new lover, a ruthless, rich South African arms dealer hoping to gain respectability through scientific discovery. As Link races from the African jungles of Mali to the rain forests of Bolivia, it becomes only too clear that two's company . . . but three's the matrix for global disaster.

At stake is nothing less than the final piece in the evolutionary puzzle, a prize that will confer instant immortality upon its discoverer. With the answer to this riddle comes technology so advanced that the future of the human race cannot go unchanged. But there's more to the search than meets the eye. A covert unit of the CIA is on the scene with a secret agenda of its own -- and the cold determination to accomplish its mission at any cost.

It's a chase that will keep readers on the edge of their seats from the first page to the final climactic revelation: that the "missing link" that made the leap from ape to man may have been stranger than we'd ever imagined. Fast-paced and provocative, this is a thriller that races the heart and challenges the mind.

Walt Becker is an author, director, and screenwriter for film and television. A native of Pasadena, California, he received a B.A. in communications from UCLA and his master's degree from the USC School of Film and Television. He wrote and directed the feature film comedy Buying the Cow for Destination Films and Sony Pictures, and his first book, Link, was published in 1998.