The people who were supposed to act wouldn’t. The people who could — did.
The Closing Window
The Story
As protest sweeps Iran, a Washington think tank does what its government will not: the Meridian Institute is running live networks inside the country. Then the thirty-nine-day war ignites, and everyone at Meridian must weigh the cost of action against the price of standing by — knowing every name on the ledger is real. A thriller about the people who move when the state hesitates, and the count that never stops.
As protest sweeps Iran and the regime answers with blood, the government agencies built to act are paralyzed — by process, by politics, by the fear of owning what comes next. The Meridian Institute is not. A private Washington think tank with donors instead of appropriations and conviction instead of cover, Meridian is running live networks inside Iran: a labor organizer in Tehran, a nurse in Karaj, sources who trusted the wrong country to catch them if they fell.
Then the thirty-nine-day war ignites, and the window everyone said would stay open begins to close.
Jonah Keller, Meridian’s executive director, has to decide what a private institution owes the people who risk everything on its word — while the National Security Council demands Meridian stand down, a Revolutionary Guard colonel closes in on the networks, and the count of names on Keller’s private ledger grows. Every choice has a price. Someone has to keep the count.
The Closing Window is a thriller about the people who move when the state hesitates — and what it costs them to live with what they set in motion.
The Order
“The count continues. So must the watching.”
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Why I wrote this
I have spent years watching good people choose between two kinds of failure: the failure of speaking and doing nothing, and the failure of acting and being unable to live with what it costs. Neither choice is clean. Both leave bodies on the ledger. I wrote this novel to sit with that contradiction long enough that a reader feels it in their own chest, the way the characters do — the way the people who actually do this work do. The Meridian Institute is invented. The choice it faces is not. The count continues. So must the watching.
— Gregg Roman
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Reading with a group?
A book-club guide — discussion questions on the characters, the costs, and the question at the heart of the novel — plus a 15-minute virtual author visit for clubs reading The Closing Window.
The Closing Window: at a glance
The people who were supposed to act wouldn’t. The people who could — did.
- Opens inside the machine — a Revolutionary Guard air-defense colonel ordered at 4:40 a.m. to turn his battery against an Iranian city, stalling the order in front of a deputy who may be the regime’s eyes.
- A Washington thread with teeth — the private Meridian Institute becomes the U.S. government’s only working window into a country it blinded and can no longer see.
- The count is the book’s signature — a nurse in Karaj records the dead the state won’t number “so the night can’t round them off to zero.”
- Fiction not written at a safe distance — built from years of conversations with Iranians who spoke at real risk, with methods and details altered to protect them.
- Publisher
- Middle East Forum Press
- ISBN (print)
- 979-8-9967558-0-6
- ISBN (ebook)
- 979-8-9967558-1-3
- Publication
- July 2026
- Pages
- ~286
- Categories
- Thriller · Espionage · Political fiction
- For readers of
- Daniel Silva · Gerald Seymour’s moral thrillers · David Ignatius’s Agents of Innocence