Archangel Eyes

Salem, Massachusetts, November 1965. The lights go out across the Northeast. A boy lies in the dark and finds himself above the town, then inside the candlelit home of a girl he is too shy to ask out. He knows what book she is reading. He has no way of knowing it. For years, he tells himself it was only a dream.

November 1985. A cascading failure takes down two main buses aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. The crew is asleep-including Navy Commander Michael Saint Pierre, whose body remains aboard while the rest of him travels past the edge of the known universe and returns certain he has been near God.

He has a systems-engineering education and three spaceflights behind him. None of it explains this. So he retreats to a Benedictine priory in the Vermont woods, where he finds Maria-sheltering with two small children three months after the national police in Guatemala took her husband and left his body in a ditch. He carries a wonder he can't say out loud; she carries a grief she can't put down. That winter, each becomes the only person the other can tell the truth to.

WASHINGTON IS ALREADY LISTENING.

In a Pentagon office that does not advertise its work, a program called PIANO has spent years combing books, journals, and government files for evidence of people like him. They don't want him silenced. They want him working. And the analyst invited into the room is Meghan Reilly-the girl from that candlelit living room in Salem, the wife he has lived apart from for years and never stopped loving. He can refuse. The men who read his file know everyone he loves, in Washington and in Vermont, and exactly what refusing will cost.

PERFECT FOR READERS WHO ENJOY:

• Science fiction grounded in real spaceflight and naval detail

• NASA, carrier aviation, and Space Shuttle-era authenticity

• Spiritual fiction about consciousness, faith, and the soul

• Cold War secrets, black programs, and quiet political menace

• Character-driven novels where the unexplained has a human cost

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan Malay is an award-winning bestselling author, lecturer, consultant, retired U.S. Navy Commander, and expert in oceanography, meteorology, and space systems. A former astronaut-selection finalist, he represented a major aerospace company before NASA and NOAA and has served as president of both the American Astronautical Society and the American Meteorological Society.

He co-authored the National Geographic Encyclopedia of Space, and his 2025 book, War in Our Wake, recounts the bitter end of the Vietnam War. He now lectures aboard luxury cruise ships and lives with his wife in Mill Creek, Washington.

Archangel Eyes is his debut novel.

It begins in a Salem bedroom and ends in orbit. If you have ever wondered what waits past the edge of what we can measure, scroll up and order your copy today.