Parting Shot

The year is 1945 and a crumbling Third Reich leaves a legacy: nuclear bombs planted in the Allied capitals. Crude by contemporary standards, they are nevertheless capable of delivering a ``parting shot'' that could set the victors against one another. Young physicist Philip Cavanaugh pieces the plot together when sent into Soviet-occupied Germany to investigate a mysterious Nazi laboratory. His knowledge places him at the center of a web of conspiracies and cross-conspiracies highlighting the mutual British-American mistrust and their joint hostility to Russia. Coauthor of Warday , Kunetka is at home with the nuclear technology of 1945 and the ambience of London and Washington, D.C., at war's end. Creating in Cavanaugh an innocent believably caught up in events beyond his comprehension, he effectively solves the frequent ``retro-techno-thriller'' problem of explaining why ``history '' was unchanged by the events invented in the novel. Solid, if unremarkable, reading. (Jan.)