Format C:

Ripped from today's headlines, Format C is a tense and compelling apocalyptic technothriller about the final battle between Good and Evil fought against the race to fix the Millennium Bug.

The richest man on earth, Ben Hinnom, owns the world's largest computer company, based in Seattle, which sells the Windgazer 99 operating system. Hinnom uses global fears of the Y2K problem to launch the ultimate domination of mankind. The only ones standing in his way are brash, yet guilt-ridden, Chicago investigative reporter Dan Levin, his computer-savvy girlfriend, Park, and her profoundly inward teenage son, Sal, a computer genius who becomes the nexus in the fight to save humanity.

Format C takes readers from the cutthroat competition of the computer world and big media in Chicago and Washington D.C., to Jerusalem's Old City where terrorists strike, to the caves of Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls and the mysterious Copper Scroll advance the intrigue, to the back alleyways of ancient Tsfat where Kabbalistic mysteries are unraveled, to the Valley of Death, the actual location of Biblical Hell in a cavern-filled valley outside Jerusalem's Old City known in ancient times for child immolation. It all culminates in the prophesied cataclysmic final battle between good and evil at midnight on December 31, 1999 at Har Megiddo in Israel, the site known as Armageddon.

Edwin Black is the author of the Macmillan best-seller, The Transfer Agreement, which won the Carl Sandburg Award for the best nonfiction book of 1984. Black is a streetwise investigative reporter, whose writings have appeared in such publications as Playboy, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and the Journal of the American Bar Association. He has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, CBS Morning News and America's Most Wanted for his investigative reports. Black won the Computer Press Association Award for editing the best new computer magazine of 1992. As a foreign correspondent in Jerusalem, he explored the actual sites of prophesy and apocalypse, where he descended into the caves and met the personalities that energize the novel.

Edwin Black, a native of Chicago, now lives in suburban Washington D.C.with his wife and daughter.

Two Millennial fears haunt most Americans: the sense of Armageddon, and the pending Y2K crisis. Both are woven together in Edwin Black's Format C:, a tense and compelling mystic techno-thriller about the final battle between good and evil fought against the race to fix the Millennium Bug.

Mystery Reader Journal - Harriet Klausner

The Y2K crisis nears with fear that many of our systems will not only fail, but dangerously so. What will happen to the overseas missiles if that occurs? John hector, CEO of Bluestar, enters the mess when he offers a viable money-making solution with Zoom software. However, the world's most powerful individual, Ben Hinnom, expects to have an information technology monopoly. Zoom stands in his way. He meets with John, who tells him what he can do with his deal. However, Ben controls medical software. He uses a by-pass code to over-stimulate John's pacemaker. Ben's only rival dies of a heart attack.

Former investigative report Dan Levin meets and falls in love with software expert Park McGuire. As their relationship quickly grows, she tells him about her suspicions on the sudden death of John and a previous employee of Ben. They combine their skills and begin to investigate the individual who appears on the edge of controlling information in the next millennium. As the 31st of Dcember, 1999, looms closer, world-wide disaster seems imminent as Ben wants to own the world. Park and Dan want to save it, but Ben seems too powerful of a foe even as the doomsday clock keeps ticking.

Format C is brilliant allegorical thriller that takes the reader on a realistic path in which the Bible meets the information technology age. The story line is non-stop action that ultimately takes the reader from Chicago to the Armageddon climax. The lead protagonists are a wonderful team, who will gain much audience support. Ben is the modern villain, using technology to destroy his opponents. Edwin Black has written one of the best millennium doomsday novels of the decade because it seems so plausible.

Black's ten award-winning bestselling books are IBM and the Holocaust (2001), British Petroleum and the Redline Agreement (2011), The Farhud (2010), Nazi Nexus (2009), The Plan (2008), Internal Combustion (2006), Banking on Baghdad (2004), War Against the Weak (2003), The Transfer Agreement (1984), and a 1999 novel, Format C:. His enterprise and investigative writings have appeared in scores of newspapers from the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune to the Sunday Times of London, Frankfurter Zeitung and the Jerusalem Post, as well as scores of magazines as diverse as Playboy, Sports Illustrated, Reform Judaism, Der Spiegel, L'Express, BusinessWeek and American Bar Association Journal. Black's articles are syndicated worldwide by Los Angeles Times Syndicate International, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post Syndicate, JTA and Feature Group News Service.