After a highly decorated police officer is found brutally murdered in the ski resort town of High Peaks, the State Bureau of Criminal Investigation steps in. Upon hearing the news, homicide investigator Noah Sutherland returns to his hometown in the Adirondacks, believing his brother's death to be more than just a cold, methodical ambush.

After solving the murder of his brother, Noah Sutherland takes on a new position near High Peaks, a ski resort town located in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. The idyllic setting is disturbed when a tourist pulls a bloated body from the lake, drawing attention to Katherine Evans, a missing residential counselor who disappeared a week prior.

As earthquakes are triggered, fault lines split, buildings crumble, and monstrous tsunamis rush inland, Jax, his daughter Zoe, and a group of civilians with vastly separate lives collide in the Northwest in an interweaving story of survival, loss, and redemption. Meanwhile, Natalie Reid is at the Gatlinburg Midnight Parade, charged with caring for teens from a group home; when the earth shakes, the sky lights up in a brilliant light, and planes fall from the sky.

Doctor Anna Hastings is no stranger to disasters, having spent much of her career as an aid worker in conflict zones around the world. Yet when an electrical phenomenon known as an EMP brings down the power grid, Anna faces catastrophe on a scale she never imagined. She must learn what it means to be a doctor in a world deprived of almost all technology.

At the end of the world. Nick Peterson never expected to be stuck with a bunch of kids. A 17-year-old boy shouldn’t be responsible for keeping other people alive. But he didn’t have much choice in the matter. That’s what happens when everyone else dies.