[3] Its protagonist is Walter Bullitt, an egocentric expert in psychoactive substances who freelances for various branches of the increasingly Nazi-influenced United States government spy apparatus.

[3] Though he passes for white, Bullitt is in fact of African-American descent in a USA where, as revealed in previous novels in the Dryco series, the American Civil War never took place.

As a result, racial relations in this version of the USA have been much more fraught, with almost all full-blooded African Americans interned and used as slave labor during World War II before being disposed of, and by 1968 even black music has been culturally marginalized.

[4] Walter is taken to this alternative New York (the primary locale of the previous five Dryco novels) which, after flooding due to the Greenhouse effect, has been moved north, is populated by all races and features in its collection of futuristic wonders television, which never caught on in his world.

Starting with the sub-James-Bond genre of swinging superstud spies a la Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm and Michael Avallone's Ed Noon, Womack builds a credible, touching and alluring alternate history limned not by expository lumps but by scattered remarks and observations from the first-person narrator.