This image is the cover for the book Tashkent Crisis

Tashkent Crisis

Superpowers play a deadly game of brinkmanship in this “unputdownable” Cold War thriller by the New York Times–bestselling author of Enemy at the Gates(Manchester Evening News).

The Soviet Union delivers an ultimatum to the president of the United States: Surrender unconditionally within 72 hours or a secret weapon of unprecedented capabilities will take millions of American lives.
President William Mellon Stark ran on a campaign of peace and kept his promises, slashing the military budget and pouring millions into domestic programs. Now the nation is years behind in the technology of mass destruction. Desperate measures are Stark’s only options.

In Soviet Asia, a team of Special Forces saboteurs led by Colonel Joe Safcek attempts to vaporize the mystery weapon with a miniature atom bomb. Closer to home, the president stages an explosive hoax to justify  evacuating Washington, DC. But as zero hours approaches, Stark realizes that it might already be too late, and that he will bear the terrible responsibility of leading the United States into the ultimate confrontation.

William J. Craig

William Craig (1929–1997) was an American historian and novelist. Born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, he interrupted his career as an advertising salesman to appear on the quiz show Tic-Tac-Dough in 1958. With his $42,000 in winnings—a record-breaking amount at the time—Craig enrolled at Columbia University and earned both an undergraduate and a master’s degree in history. He published his first book, The Fall of Japan, in 1967. A narrative history of the final weeks of World War II in the Pacific, it reached the top ten on the New York Times bestseller list and was deemed “virtually flawless” by the New York Times Book Review. In order to write Enemy at the Gates (1973), a documentary account of the Battle of Stalingrad, Craig travelled to three continents and interviewed hundreds of military and civilian survivors. A New York Times bestseller, the book inspired a film of the same name starring Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes. In addition to his histories of World War II, Craig wrote two acclaimed espionage thrillers: The Tashkent Crisis (1971) and The Strasbourg Legacy (1975).

Open Road Integrated Media