WARSAW CONCERTO and its sequel EIGHT MILES HIGH were written to read as a single book (which, published singly would have been humongously long; hence, the two-parter)!
It is November 1966 in an altered timeline in which the swinging sixties never happened and the Cold War has returned with a bitingly chilly vengeance.
Four years on from the Cuban Missiles War the survivors are struggling to come to terms with the new world order in which the United States, seemingly all-powerful is still struggling to come to terms with the horrors of civil war in the Midwest.
East and West have never been so far apart, the aftermath of World War III is still, painfully unravelling. Worse, Cold War or not, hot war is never far away in the Mediterranean.
Much of France is a wasteland still under the cruel thumb of the Red Dawn-inspired fanatical regime in the south. Nor has the end of fighting in the American Midwest made life in the White House a bed of roses.
Old scandals and the Soviet Unionβs unexpected flexing of Cold War muscles in bomb-ruined Berlin do nothing to calm anxieties in Washington and England.
Nobody knows if the world is at last belatedly beginning to come to terms with the realities of the post-nuclear war era; or simply staggering towards the next crisis.
The October War has broken the old world order; now a new one is emerging but inevitably, the adjustments required are painful and before they can happen, war and global realpolitik must run their brutal course.
Nothing is simple, while leaders wrestle with the tragedy of the age, at home they must look over their shoulders as the self-same evils of the years before the cataclysm, threaten to return to haunt them.