Lynn Dayton is a high-powered and highly-charged executive vice president in charge of refineries for an international oil conglomerate. She has invested her career potential in insuring the purchase of Centennial, a refinery on the Houston Ship Channel whose purported profitability has concealed an in-house saboteur. When lives are lost and the refinery itself is put in danger, Lynn rushes into action to investigate, only to discover that the web of conspiracy targets not only Centennial, but many other refining corporations as well.

An idealistic ecoterrorist has set his sights on destruction of a majority of the U.S.’s refining capacity, and he has an Asian oil conglomerate funding him, and demanding ever more destruction. In the meantime, Lynn must cope with the increasing debilitation of her father’s emphysema, her grief at the recent loss of her mother to bone cancer, and the isolation from her sister Ceil, until recently a Peace Corps teacher in Gabon. Ceil has been tugged into the conspiracy as a victim and as bait to draw in her sister Lynn, a knowledgeable and productive engineer-manager.

Author L A. Starks delivers an unstoppable thriller that put this reviewer in mind of bestselling novels of this genre over the last several decades, with the welcome addition of depth. Ms. Starks leads her readers through an education in the management and processing of oil into its various essential products. In addition, she explores current political, economic, and energy issues in depth, and weaves into her complex tapestry a rich background in mathematical theory and history via the introduction into the story of a modern-day devotee of Pythagoras, famous Greek mathematician of the 5th century B.C. When the reader turns the final page of 13 Days: The Pythagoras Conspiracy, it will be with an understanding and education gleaned smoothly and without strain or difficulty. This is truly a book which will linger in the reader’s mind long after the final ending, as we wonder: “What if?” In a world which has seen the consequences of energy complications as early as the oil embargo of the 1970’s, right through the massive natural disasters and destruction wrought by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to refinery and storage capacity, 13 Days: The Pythagoras Conspiracy is a thriller whose potentials are altogether too probable to ignore.

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