Roger Cottrell

In the 1950's, in McCarthyite Hollywood, former Pinkerton and hack screen writer Toby Slaughter failed to prevent the murder of his Mexican lover at the hands of a powerful Hollywood cabal. More than a decade later, in 1960's Britain, he is a washed out gumshoe, like a cliche from one of his own films offered a chance to redeem himself by tracking down missing heiress Susan Featherstone. But the closer he gets to his target the more dangerous and duplicitous it gets with nothing less than the future of British democracy - and his own life - at stake

This bleak and nightmarish recreation of George Orwell's 1984 presents Winston Smith as a correspondent in a war-torn London, Airstrip One. While investigating a gruesome murder, he spirals helplessly from London to a Nazi-occupied Vietnam in an obsessive pursuit of the awful truth behind a veil of lies. He uncovers the dark heart of political intrigue, betrayal and state tyranny.

Tobias Slaughter - ex Pinkerton, Communist writer of screenplays and now Private Investigator. Sounds like an interesting, and dangerous, man to know. In this masterful blend of historical fact and alternate reality, Roger Cottrell follows the life of Slaughter through three decades and two continents, mixing murders of union officials with the McCarthy witchhunts and the plot to destabilize the British Labour Goverment of the 1960s. In another world, this might have happened. In this world, much of it did.