Zero Visibility Possible

by Nina Burleigh

At the center of the worst mass shooting in US history is a black hole. Why did a wealthy, white middle-aged man who liked guns and gambling and once worked for the U.S. government cause this public tragedy? Set over three days in 2017, a small group of journalists is tasked with witnessing and making sense of senseless mass violence as the truth-telling structure collapses. They struggle with malleable facts, disinformation, and conspiracy theories; they are lured by and resist the increasingly popular notion of a hallucinatory mirror world, the sense that important truths are hidden.

A dark satire about American violence and media and the lure of conspiracy thinking, this is the first novel in a trilogy exploring the effects of our dystopian times on inner lives.


Praise for Zero Visibility Possible
“Nina Burleigh's Zero Visibility Possible is a brilliant, dark, witty and
obsessively readable mystery about one of the darkest and strangest
crimes in America's recent memory...and shows us that the more our
technology knows about us, the less we know about ourselves, and even
the narrators of our national story don't always tell us, or themselves,
the whole truth.”
– Rick Wilson, author of Everything Trump Touches Dies

“2017. A baffling, horrific event, the greatest mass shooting in US history. A public tragedy with a black hole at the center, the enigma of the wealthy white middle-aged man who liked guns and gambling and once worked for the U.S. government. A small group of journalists are tasked with making sense of it while struggling variously with PTSD, failed legacy media, debased public leadership, personal crises, sex, and lies. Zero Visibility Possible is a dark satire about people bearing witness to cruelty and violence, abject to algorithms and surveillance, and the lure of conspiracy thinking as disinformation ops flood the zone and anything seems possible and true in a society de-linked from agreed-upon fact.”
– Ian Shapira, Washington Post

“In her stick-of-dynamite of a debut novel, Nina Burleigh displays a journalist’s eye for detail, a filmmaker’s skill at world-building, a poet’s way with words, and a sibyl’s gift for unpleasant prophesy. Set in an alternate reality where Donald and Ivanka exist but Steve Bannon does not, Zero Visibility Possible is a riveting thriller about mass shooters, CIA pilots, crypto operatives, and journalists of all men and women, young and old, innocent and jaded, celibate and insatiable, corporate sellouts and those still speaking truth to power. Over the span of a few days, we witness a collision of old media and new, old money and new, old reporters and new, old spooks and new—and the resulting explosion goes all the way to Plattsburgh. It’s The Crying of Lot 49 meets Network, Slow Horses in the (virtual) a brilliant and highly entertaining book that I’m told, and I hope, is the first in a trilogy. Zero Visibility Possible possesses the ineffable and rare quality summed up in six magic I can’t stop thinking about it.”
– Greg Olear, author of Fathermucker and Totally Killer

238 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 19, 2024

About the author

Nina is an award-winning author and journalist and documentary producer with wide-ranging interests including politics, history, conservation, exploration and science. She has written seven books and has been published in the New Yorker, Time, New York and People, among many other journals and rags. She publishes a national political substack called American Freakshow. She has occasionally shellacked her hair for television, including Good Morning America, Nightline, and various programs on CNN and C-Span, as well as flogged books on NPR and countless radio outlets.

The daughter of author and artist Robert Burleigh and Berta Burleigh, a teacher who emigrated to the USA from Iraq in the 1950s, Nina was born and educated in the Midwest, has traveled extensively in the Middle East and lived in Italy and France. She covered the Clinton White House for Time and reported and wrote human interest stories at People Magazine from New York. She is an adjunct professor at New York University and has lectured in Norway, Mexico, Italy and around the US..

Her first novel, Zero Visibility Possible, will be published in 2024, the first in a trilogy of dark satires about characters grappling with aspects of climate change, conspiracy theories and disinformation.

Her nonfiction books include The Trump Women: Part of the Deal, a lively study of the women in Trump's world; Unholy Business, a true tale of how modern science is being used to support the curious world of biblical relic trade and forgery; her book about Napoleon's scientists in Egypt, Mirage, was selected by the New York Times as an editors' choice and won the Society of Women Educators' Award in 2008.

Reviews

[Evans Otieno · Rating 2 out of 5]

That we are in a simulation, he was so good at playing video games, how did it turn out to be a shoot out? An interesting plot of the current state of the US. The change in the dynamics of the media and decentralization at large. How bad do we fight bureaucracy? Is it freedom or democracy that's leading the United States into shambles? There's only one way to find out.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terrifying