My book choice this week is Brendan DuBois’ Resurrection Day.
One of my favourite alternate history novels, which is a mystery story set in a world in which the Cuban missile crisis turned nuclear.
Brendan DuBois is an award-winning U.S. author of mystery stories: this alternate-world thriller is very much in the tradition of Robert Harris’s Fatherland. Consider this striking blurb line: “Everyone remembered exactly what they were doing the day President Kennedy tried to kill them.” History went awry in this world’s Cuba crisis, leading to a 1962 nuclear war that devastated Russia, crippled America, and left Britain a major world power smugly giving aid to the USA. Cut to 1972 Boston and ex-soldier Carl Landry, now a newspaper reporter whose coverage of a routine murder is suppressed by military censors. He’s unwisely curious, investigates further, and inevitably stirs up a hornets’ nest. Attacks, deaths, and disappearances follow. With a new-found girlfriend–an English Times reporter who is not all she seems–Landry uncovers a succession of red-hot secrets about abandoned New York, perfidious British and military plotting, and crucial documents coveted by several factions with different beliefs about their contents. Is Kennedy unjustly despised for starting World War III? Is the rumor that he’s still alive just this timeline’s version of the Elvis myth? After building up terrific tension, DuBois delivers satisfying answers. Grimly plausible (apart from a few lapses in “British” dialogue) and worthy of the Fatherland comparisons.
I have read the book a few times now and enjoy it all the time, well worth reading.
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk
I really enjoyed this book too. I also have Six Days and Betrayed by the same author but neither quite manage to capture the atmosphere of this one.