Alongside Night is the story of the final economic collapse of the United States as seen through the eyes of 16-year-old Elliot Vreeland, searching for his missing Nobel-laureate-economist father, and the mysterious teenage “Lorimer” whom Elliot meets in a black-market underground, whose own father might be the reason Elliot’s father is missing.

Jack Goldwater, an IRS agent on loan to the Federal Air Marshal Service, is relieved of field duty after insulting a powerful U.S. Senator, and finds himself exiled to a humiliating desk job in Nevada as the federal receiver managing a legal brothel in tax default, where — with the help of the brothel Madam, Lady Magdalene — he uncovers an Al Qaeda plot to unload a nuclear-bomb-sized crate at Hoover Dam.