Resurrection Day

Mystery novelist Brendan DuBois makes a foray into the alternate timeline realm and gives us a gripping and chilling dark tale featuring Boston Globe reporter Carl Landry, who is on the trail of a government conspiracy. Somewhere between the gritty work of Andrew Vachss, the hard-boiled detective novels of Dennis Lehane, and the alternate history arena usually ruled by the likes of Harry Turtledove, Brendan DuBois has wedged himself firmly into the highest ranks of fine suspense writers and mined a fantasy noir niche all his own. The time is 1972, ten years after the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated into World War III. Russia has been all but obliterated, and many U.S. cities are no more than crater-strewn radioactive ruins. The U.S. relies on Great Britain for medical aid and food, and now exists in a state of martial law, with the government censoring all media. Kennedy and Johnson are presumed dead, although there's an underground of "true believers" who conclude that Kennedy is recovering from injury in a secret spot of safety and will soon rise to take command of a floundering America. The spray-painted words "he lives" can be found all across sides of buildings wherever one walks, but controlling the fate of America is the somewhat fascist General Curtis, who still wields military might.

Carl Landry, a former soldier who survived the worst of the war, is now a reporter with the Boston Globe. He's doing a story on murdered veteran Merl Sawson, a possibly unhinged man who swears he has an incredible story to tell Landry. Sawson gives only the vaguest suggestion that he's awareofthe true events that started the war back in '62. When Sawson is found with a couple of bullets in the back of his head, and Landry's editor at the Globe immediately spikes his story for "lack of space," Landry begins to suspect that perhaps Sawson actually did know something big. Soon he meets Sandra Price, a London Times reporter who is eager to do a story on America's present course,