Both conservative and liberal Baby Boomers have romanticized the 1950s as an age of innocence—of pickup ball games and Howdy Doody, when mom stayed home, and the economy boomed. On 24 December 1979, Soviet armed forces entered Afghanistan, beginning an occupation that would last almost a decade and creating a political crisis that shook the world. How lucky we are that the world survived the cold war and can afford to let it become history and fictive backdrop.

His relationship with "C" is central to this plot as before and sees him deployed on a mission to investigate a light plane crash which soon spreads to involve various agencies in a post-cold war Europe and Mediterranean. Its ideologies influence China, Russia, and the United States; Iraq and Afghanistan have been destroyed by the faith in purely military solutions that emerged from the Cold War. This however, does not help the story much and the reader (who has not read the prequel) feels a bit trapped with so much background info when all she wants to do is get on with the story.With a foot in two camps (in and out) kind of, this gives Kell an amount of outsider perspective to the fun and games going on inside British Intelligence. countermeasures include 300 megatons of nuclear weapons and a continuity of government base hundreds of light years from Earth, connected via a gate in Washington.

What follows is an intriguing, page turning, brilliant adventure that will keep you on your toes and guessing all the way. I have another Charles Cumming on my shelf, BOX 88, but I’ll have to wait until I’ve forgotten I’ve read him again before I pick it up! In late 2011 it appeared in two Cthulhu-themed anthologies: The Book of Cthulhu by Night Shade Books ( ISBN 1597802328) [7] and New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird by Prime Books ( ISBN 1607012898).

It depicts but doesn’t dwell on Communist cruelty such as Stalin's purges and deliberate famine in the Ukraine, Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward, and the lack of political freedom and eventual economic stagnation in the Eastern bloc.