Friday, March 31, 2023

Ten must-read alternate history thrillers

Josh Weiss is a first-time author from South Jersey. Raised in a proud Jewish home, he was instilled with an appreciation for his cultural heritage from a very young age. Today, Weiss is utterly fascinated with the convergence of Judaism and popular culture in film, television, comics, literature, and other media. After college, he became a freelance entertainment journalist, writing stories for SYFY WIRE, The Hollywood Reporter, Forbes, and Marvel Entertainment.

Weiss's new novel is Sunset Empire, the thrilling alternate history sequel to Beat the Devils.

[My Book, The Movie: Beat the Devils; The Page 69 Test: Beat the Devils; My Book, The Movie: Sunset Empire]

At CrimeReads Weiss recommended ten must-read alternate history thrillers, including:
Resurrection Day, Brendan DuBois (1999)

Resurrection Day takes the Cold War specter of mutually assured destruction to its logical conclusion, chillingly painting a world so vivid, it feels less like a work of fiction and more like a historical text plucked from somewhere out in the multiverse.

Set 10 years after the United States and Soviet Union exchanged ICMBs, a weary world tries its best to pick up the pieces of nuclear devastation. The USSR has essentially been wiped off the map, while America barely clings to its own sovereignty, relying on foreign aid from Britain and Canada. The late President John Fitzgerald Kennedy enjoys an almost mythological postmortem status, but not the one he received in the wake of our universe’s Dallas assassination. Blamed for failing to stop the deaths of millions of innocent people, Kennedy (and anyone even closely associated with him) is considered a mass murderer in line with Hitler and Stalin.

But does JFK truly deserve such infamy? That’s what Carl Landry, a reporter for the Boston Globe and former advisor to U.S. forces in South Vietnam (the sudden atomic war put the kibosh on the whole Indochina quagmire before it could begin in earnest) must find out.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue