Everyone remembers where they were the day JFK tried to kill them…

It may surprise CTT readers to learn that I never managed to read this book until recently. However, I read it and I enjoyed it, although I do have a few bones to pick with the author.

The book in set in a 1970, two decades after the Cuban Missile Crisis exploded into a thermonuclear war between America and Russia. The US is a nation slowly recovering from a small number of atomic strikes, while Russia (and apparently China) have been completely destroyed. The US is under marital law, with heavy rationing, and is dependent upon charity from Britain.

The hero of the book is a newspaper hack in a world where all news is censored by the military. Taking an interest in the death of an old man, the hero is dragged into a search for the truth about the man and an answer to the question everyone is asking: is JFK still alive? Complicating matters are a dastardly British plot and a conspiracy designed (with major incompetence) to kill him and his girlfriend.

I do have some issues with the details of the alternate world. I don’t think that Europe would have escaped damage in a war – the USSR would have to head west merely to make sure that the Europeans could not benefit from the war. A reunification of east and West Germany would be far more opposed by both Britain and France, instead of the pesudo-EU presented in the book. Further, I don’t think that the US would have been the only nation to keep nuclear weapons (it seems to be a pariah state in this TL, Britain is their only friend), having shown a major willingness to use them, I’d expect India, Europe and Britain to embark upon major nuke-building sprees. The one attempt made to solve that particular problem is abandoned towards the end of the book for no obvious reason.

Overall, I enjoyed the novel. Four out of Five.

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