"VanOps: The Lost Power"

When the twins arrived at their father's Napa vineyard, thirty-something Maddy Marshall and Will Argones wondered what was going on. Their sister Bella had been invited as well. Why all the family togetherness among siblings who had been dispersed far and wide?

Suddenly, a gunshot. The twins' father, the target of a Russian sniper, lives only long enough to speak the words that will propel Maddy and Will into Dan Brownian motion to find a mysterious other-worldly weapon.

"VanOps: The Lost Power" ($16.49 in paperback from Black Opal Books; also for Amazon Kindle), by Grass Valley novelist Avanti Centrae (avanticentrae.com), is a page-turner that takes its protagonists from a medieval Spanish castle to a secret underground city in Israel--and beyond.

Centrae's debut novel is the first in a series featuring VanOps, short for "Vanguard Operations," a top-secret CIA group chartered "to keep an eye out for any sort of advanced or obscure technology that threatened the security of the United States." 

Winner of the Genre Grand Prize at the Chanticleer International Book Awards, and a Hollywood Book Festival Honorable Mention, the story is a quest within a quest. 

A thousand years ago Ramiro I, the first King of Spain, founded a dynasty that "contributed to, not only the current Spanish ruling class, but also to the royal families of nearly all the other current European monarchies." Ramiro wielded obelisks of amazing power, said to be passed down from Alexander the Great, and said also to be part of the legacy of his descendants, Ferdinand and Isabella.

Maddy and Will are part of that great lineage. She is a world-class athlete, skilled in aikido; he is an engineer. Together they must find those who guard the ancient weapons, and then solve a series of clues to find the weapons themselves, all the time tailed by Russians who seem to know their every move.

They are joined by Teddy "Bear" Thorenson, an old high school classmate with "an embarrassing one-way crush" on Maddy, whom they just happen to run into, and who turns out to be a covert VanOps agent.

Will it be enough to win? Readers will have a thrilling time finding out.