Set in the Tom Clancy universe, the novel depicts Jack Ryan Jr. as he helps avert a North Korean plot to crash the Asian stock market, along with his Hendley Associates colleague Paul Brown, in Singapore.
Having known Brown as a colleague from the Central Intelligence Agency years ago, he then secretly entrusts the accountant with planting the flash drive in the Dalfan computer network, under the pretense of him being assigned by the CIA to find out whether China had inserted malware into the system.
Ryan is introduced to the company’s technological advances in the fields of virtual reality, quantum cryptography, and especially digital surveillance in the form of Dalfan’s flagship program, the Steady Stare drone, which “time travels” through 24/7 video monitoring of Singapore in order to pinpoint the circumstances behind a particular crime.
As the audit progresses, Ryan and Brown stumble upon a suspicious pattern of transactions to a Shanghai importer, where Dalfan has been selling disposable mobile phones to at a reduced rate.
Unbeknownst to him, Yong Fairchild, who is Dalfan’s chief financial officer, and his girlfriend Meili, who is a Chinese spy, orchestrated the attempted murder in order to silence him.
Because cell service is down in Singapore because of the tropical storm, deterring any contact to the U.S. embassy, Ryan, Brown, and Lian decide to drive all the way to the neighboring country of Malaysia in order to try to stop the virus.
A flashback establishes that Brown was honored in the CIA for saving Rhodes from an ambush by Zvezdev in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1985, where he had seemingly killed the Bulgarian intelligence officer.
On February 20, 2017, The Real Book Spy announced that principal authors in the Tom Clancy universe, Mark Greaney and Grant Blackwood are leaving the franchise.
He elaborated that "Tom Clancy’s genius was to bring current technology into stories in a powerful and entertaining way, but he also created some of the most compelling characters in the genre—a genre he essentially invented.
"[4] Unlike Clancy, who goes to countries to research for his novels, Maden relied on the Internet, or "interwebs", for information into the genuine technologies featured in Point of Contact.