The book begins in Downing Street but not as we know it: the year is 1949, the Allied Powers’ advance on Moscow in the wake of Nazi defeat has failed. Stalin’s tanks are rumbling through London and Winston Churchill emerges from his bunker, draws a revolver and decides upon the only course of action left to him. We switch to 1989. England is divided along north-south lines between Soviet and American sectors, with London split in two. Metropolitan People’s Police detective Harry Stark works in Scotland Yard with a view of Victory Embankment and the charred stump of Big Ben on the other side of the London Wall. Under Blackfriars Bridge a river border patrol finds a hanging corpse. Stark is called to investigate. A hard-working honest cop whose chief delight is a pint in The Rose (formerly ‘and Crown’) he has no truck with the sinister Department of Social Security political police. An American infiltrator tells him the body is linked to a dissident plot involving his wayward little sister, his socialist hero father’s secret past and the notorious suicide of the ‘villainous’ Churchill himself. But should he believe him or the slimy DoSS major who feeds him an altogether different version of history? A gripping murder mystery mixed with personal and political upheaval set in an alternative Britain that is the front line of the Cold War, written by the award-winning British journalist who covered the fall of the Berlin Wall.
