Part of the loose Crosstime Traffic family of books, it is set in a world in an alternate history in which the Soviet Union has won the Cold War.

The plot of The Gladiator follows the same formula of the other books in the series with an imperiled company operative and local protagonists being used as guides to the parallel.

Thus, communism spreads throughout Latin America and Southeast Asia giving the Soviet Union an upper hand in economic and military strength over the United States.

Religion, despite communism's taboo against it, has been relatively untouched in countries such as Italy, where even the staunchest Italian communist was known to attend a Catholic Mass.

The protagonists of the novel, Gianfranco and Annarita, are teenagers in the Italian People's Republic, now a satellite state of the USSR.