According to a shock CIA report, Russian cosmonauts have managed to deflect a giant asteroid onto a collision course with the United States - presenting the President with an impossible moral dilemma: either he must wait passively for almost certain annihilation or retaliate first with a massive nuclear strike, thereby completing the devastation of the planet . . .
The only hope of avoiding catastrophe lies with an elite team of astronomers and astrophysicists, gathered secretly at Eagle Peak Observatory, Arizona. They have just five days to identify the asteroid - codenamed Nemesis - and come up with a plan to stop it. If they can't, the President will have to assume the asteroid is going to hit and act accordingly.
But as time begins to run out and the search for Nemesis becomes increasingly desperate, British asteroid expert Oliver Webb has an extraordinary idea - that the key lies not in the modern technological wizardry of telescopes and computers, but in the dusty pages of an obscure seventeenth-century Latin manuscript whose author was condemned as a heretic.
Suddenly, after centuries of neglect, the only remaining copy of Vincenzo Vincenzi's 'Phaenomenis Novae' has become the most sought-after book in the world . . .
