SHOTSMAG CONFIDENTIAL: Brendan DuBois Resurrected

For me, one of the delights of attending Bouchercon, is to meet the writers that were behind the novels that pepper my life, books that startled me, books that made me think and books that entertained me – and perhaps challenged the way I view reality.

One great pleasure was not only to meet Brendan Dubois, but actually spend time with him. We first met briefly on a stairwell at Bouchercon Indianapolis, but in Albany we even got to share a panel together on Private Eye Fiction last month.

I got to thank him for the wonderful novel Resurrection Day which I read over a decade ago, and was just blown away. Brendan is not that well known in the UK, but it was the cover that caught my eye, and the tag line "Everyone remembers exactly what they were doing the day President Kennedy tried to kill them."

I’m not the only one captivated by this chilling alternate history thriller as Publisher’s Weekly reported on release in 1999 -

In his first novel outside of his acclaimed Lewis Cole mystery series (Shattered Sand, Forecasts, Feb. 15, etc.), DuBois delivers an alternate-history thriller that deserves to be as popular as Robert Harris's Fatherland. DuBois postulates an America that has been politically devastated by a nuclear exchange arising from the Cuban missile crisis. It's now 1972. Washington, D.C., is a radioactive crater; Nelson Rockefeller is running for president against George McGovern; and Boston Globe reporter Carl Landry is investigating the shooting death of a 60-year-old retired serviceman. Warned off the story after it gets spiked by the military's in-house censor, and emboldened by Sandra Price, a beautiful reporter from the London Times, Landry keeps digging at Swenson's past. What he uncovers is the truth behind the rumors of what really happened in the White House as the missile crisis spun out of control--and evidence of an unholy alliance that is poised to reverse the course of American history. From cryptic references to post-bomb chaos in California to clever reworkings of '60s history (e.g., antidraft demonstrators chanting, ""Hell, no, we won't glow!""), DuBois creates a sobering and imaginatively detailed vision of an America that has been crippled by tragedy--a nation where John F. Kennedy was not the King Arthur of Camelot but its Mordred, the man who brought down everything. One of DuBois's many brilliant touches is an underground of diehard Kennedy supporters who scrawl the graffiti ""He Lives"" on every available surface, because they believe that JFK was not only innocent, but is still alive and broadcasting from a pirate radio station. Cohesively plotted and smoothly written, steadily exciting and rife with clever conceits, this is what-if thriller fiction at its finest. Foreign rights sold in the U.K., Germany and Holland. (June)

Thursday, 10 October 2013

Brendan DuBois Resurrected

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