‘So that’s how it is. We’ll move on to Plan B.’ He pointed the gun again at Frank. ‘Plan B is revenge. Take me to your leader.’

Two hundred years from now the catastrophes that almost destroyed human civilization are long in the past. Life goes on.

John Carr – hero of the resistance, believed to have died in combat during the last-ditch defence of London – is coming home. He wants the woman he left behind; one last chance to strike a blow for freedom; revenge. What he gets is an offer he can’t refuse and a one-way ticket to the New York islands, on a mission for the brutal regime he opposed.

In East America he comes to a decision. He will return home again. And this time things will be different.

Author Peter Darvill-Evans wrote three books in the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook series, and subsequently worked at Virgin Publishing, where he was in charge of the department that commissioned and published (among much else) Doctor Who books, both fiction and non-fiction, during the 1990s when the television programme was not being made and seemed unlikely to reappear. He published the first novels by Mark Gatiss, Russell T Davies, Andrew Lane, Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel and Paul Cornell, among many others. He wrote three Doctor Who novels himself, for Virgin and BBC Books. He then executed a massive career swerve and trained as, and became, one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Taxes. Now retired from that, he is writing again.