Promises to Keep

‘Nerve-tingling political blockbuster’ – Daily Express

Texas, 1963

America’s youngest president is visiting Dallas, driving through Dealey Plaza in an open car.

Then shots ring out, and President Cassidy’s glamorous wife, Suzanne, finds her bright pink suit soaked in her husband’s blood.

But this president is not dead. President John T Cassidy is terribly wounded, but he’s still alive. Just…

As President Cassidy begins his slow and painful recovery, his dynastic family is determined to maintain its grip on political power, despite the manoeuvrings of political rivals.

The authorities try to find out who shot President Cassidy, and why?

It seems that the first of those questions is quickly answered, as a gunman is arrested and then assassinated himself. The Dallas police are content that justice has been done.

But for one FBI agent, the answers are not so clear-cut and Agent Sullivan begins his own search for the truth.

Meanwhile, the social changes that marked the 1960s are unfolding.

In far off Vietnam, trouble is brewing. Trouble that will affect the Cassidy clan in the most terrible way.

Back at home, Sullivan is reaching his own conclusions, and uncovering another way in which foreign policy has impacted upon the Cassidys…

And in time, Sullivan comes to realise that sometimes the people who ought to be the most trustworthy, are actually the most treacherous.

As the story hurtles to its gripping conclusion, it would seem that they may not yet have finished with the Cassidy family…

Promises to Keep is an epic tale of an alternative reality – a compelling story in its own right, and one that also allows the reader to speculate upon what might have happened, had the actual events of November 1963 been slightly different.

Praise for Geroge Bernau

‘A story of conspiracy and corruption, of assassination, of regicide. For a generation of Americans, it is the story of their age.’ – Gary Hart, Los Angeles Times

‘Bernau accurately paints recognizable characters jousting for political power … Sharp-edged cutting between these players and a host of dangerous, shadowy conspirators keeps the tension running high’ – Publishers Weekly

‘What Bernau has done, without intending it, is to invent a fertile new fictional genre: the “what if … if only” school of fiction’ – The Guardian

‘A real page-turner … Never has the Kennedy myth been more dramatically rendered!’ – David Horowitz, co-author of The Kennedys: An American Dream

George Bernau worked as a motion-picture studio executive at Universal Studios in Hollywood for several years before leaving to study law at the University of Southern California. After graduating with honours, he began practising with a major law firm in San Diego, where he became a full partner in 1979.