Author(s): Owen Matthews

NZ historical fiction

The author of the astonishing Black Sun returns with a new Cold War thriller set during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, seen from a bone-chilling vantage point- somewhere off the Florida coastline, trapped aboard the claustrophobic confines of an isolated Soviet submarine with open orders to launch its nuclear payload. The year is 1962, and KGB Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vasin is searching for ghosts- for evidence of the long-rumoured existence of an American spy embedded at the highest echelons of Soviet power. But it's while on this wild goose chase, a high-stakes espionage race against a rival State agency, that Vasin first hears whispers of an ominous top-secret undertaking- Operation Anadyr. As tensions flare between Nikita Khrushchev and President Kennedy over Russian missiles hidden in Cuba, four Soviet submarines - each carrying tactical ballistic missiles armed with thermonuclear warheads - are ordered to make a covert run at the U.S. blockade in the Caribbean . . . One of the most treacherous and terrifying moments in modern history - when the fate of the world lay with a lone, nervous Soviet naval officer one hundred meters under the sea and out of all contact with his commanders - lies at the heart of the claustrophobically tense new Cold War thriller by the author of the acclaimed Black Sun.