For 500 years, legends spoke of a lost ancient city, hidden in the tropical forest of Honduras - a place so sacred that those who dared to disturb it would fall ill and die.

In 2012, Douglas Preston joined a team of scientists in their search for the White City, boarding a rickety airplane, whose historic flight would change everything. Using space technology that could map the ground beneath the dense canopy of the jungle, that flight revealed staggering evidence not only of a city but of an entire lost civilization.
However, when the expedition finally reached the ruins, battling torrential rains and deadly snakes in the densest jungle in the world, tragedy struck: Preston and others were afflicted with a mysterious - and incurable - disease.