The Dearth, a novel by Mike Jacobs

Beekeepers have a word for the stretch of late summer when the flowers quit. The dearth. It is not the disaster. It is the condition.

At 3:14 in the morning, a fifth of the world’s digital dollars moved nine hundred miles east. Nobody had asked them to.

Amos Reed was the best money-and-machines reporter in the business, until a true story told too early cost him his name. Now he keeps bees in Minnesota and writes a blog almost no one reads. He does not intend to be right about anything ever again.

Then the dollar comes apart. A currency that could not lie, backed by a proof anyone could check, breaks in one August weekend. The money runs. The world decides China did it.

And the man who ended Amos’s career drives up his gravel road with a drawer full of warnings nobody read.

The Dearth is a thriller whose villain is not a person. What really happened is stranger than the story the world settled on. And it is worse.

The evidence was never hidden. It was published. Nobody was looking at that page.