It’s London, England after Armageddon. Europe has been nuked by Christian fundamentalists, Russia’s a criminal kleptocracy, and America is in the hands of the extreme religious right; Japan has copied Atlantis and has sunk beneath the waves. It seems that every last refugee in the world has found their way to London, every park remade as a container-favela while the streets are an impenetrable tide of the dispossessed, desperate, and merely criminal.
Samuil Petrovitch is a Russian doctoral student (high-energy physics) who dwells in the shanty town where Clapham Common used to be. It’s just another morning as he shuffles down the stairs, carefully so as not to catch anyone’s eye en-route to his desk at Imperial College. He has survived the mafia wars of St. Petersburg by not getting involved but that’s about to change.
By happenstance he’s at the scene of the attempted kidnapping of a young woman. Reacting fast, he helps her escape and is soon being pursued by the Ukrainian mob, the neo-Yakuzas, and Detective Inspector Chain of the Metropolitan Police. Luckily he has help – from an armored, tooled up Catholic nun. And did I mention that Petrovitch has a heart problem – it keeps stopping?
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