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A chilling tale of intrigue and betrayal in the aftermath of an American nuclear war, and one of the most inventive novels of alternative history since Robert Harris's Fatherland.
What if the Cuban Missile Crisis had become a full-blown atomic war? So begins Resurrection Day by Brendan DuBois, a fascinating novel of tantalizing, speculative history. The place is Boston. The year is 1972. It has been ten years since bombs fell over major cities in the United States and the Soviet Union. Russia is decimated. Omaha and San Diego are virtually destroyed. Washington, D.C., lies beneath a giant crater lake. President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson, and their families have disappeared and are believed dead. "The best and the brightest" of their administration are disgraced or in hiding. America is a shell of her former glory, a second-rate power dependent upon the kindness of Britain. Martial law rules.
Carl Landry, a young reporter with The Boston Globe, arrives at the scene of a murder. A friendless man, a veteran of the '62 war, has been shot in his bed. Landry begins to suspect that the man has taken secrets to his grave. What was this man doing in the War Room of the White House in October 1962? Who pushed the button that started the war? What is the legend and what is the lie? Who was the betrayer and who the betrayed? And could John F. Kennedy, by some miracle, still be alive?
DuBois has carefully interwoven fact and fiction to create a seamless story of multilayered suspense--an unnerving story of what might have been.
Excerpt
RESURRECTION DAY
The dead man lay on his face in his bed, the sheets and blankets pooled around his feet. The back of his head was a bloody mush. He had on a pair of baggy white shorts and his skinny legs were quite hairy. The apartment smelled of old clothes and dusty air and something else. Carl Landry recognized that third smell. It was the odor of a body, brutally violated, giving up its life. It was a smell that had intrigued him once. Then it had saddened him. Now, it was just something he was used to. Just part of the job.
Carl was a reporter with the Boston Globe and he stood at the dead man's bedroom door, notebook in hand, carefully recording everything he could see, writing in a cramped style that had seen him through high school and the Army and four years of newspaper work.
Detective Paul Malone caught his eye and separated himself from the chattering group of cops. He and Carl were friends, sort of. As much as a cop and reporter can be. Malone was in his...
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