Launch Code by Michael Ridpath

November 1983, six hundred feet beneath the Atlantic: submarine Lieutenant Bill Guth and his fellow officers suddenly receive the order they've long-prepared for. To launch their nuclear missiles in a retaliatory strike against the USSR. But in the unexpected chaos that follows, the argument over whether to obey the order leaves one person dead... Norfolk, 2019: Bill's annual family gathering is interrupted when a historian turns up unannounced to ask about a near-apocalyptic incident back in 1983. And the death that prevented it. Bill remains his usual taciturn self - the details are classified - and the historian leaves, unenlightened. But that night, the historian is brutally murdered in the local pub. Bill and his family are all thrown under suspicion. What happened all those years ago? Just how much is Bill to blame for events in the past, and indeed the present? As the shades of history reveal themselves, another person is killed, and it becomes clear there is a killer at work who will stop at nothing to keep the secrets of 1983 where they belong...

ISBN: 9781786496997