Cold New Dawn — Ian St. James

Overlong, conventional novelizing about post-WW II Britain. Cold New Dawn starts engagingly, telling us about the grade-school days of Keir Milford and Dusty Miller--two likable chaps who consort like little colonels at school, with Dusty as the ace talker and Keir a whiz at cricket. Dusty enters a two-year physical liaison with a girl 18 months his senior, while Keir falls for Dawn Wharton, an aspiring actress. Meanwhile, Keir's class-conscious parents--Joe, a wheelchair-bound veteran, and Edith--run a small grocery-, and think Keir is wasting his savings escorting Dawn to West End theaters and lavish dinners. Dawn allows Keir some restrained sexual favors but is set utterly on becoming an actress. One night in a fit of jealousy Keir rapes Dawn, then joins the army. Just before going overseas to Germany, however, he gets a call from Dawn: she's pregnant and penniless. Keir sets her up with his folks for her confinement, offers to marry her--but only Dawn knows that the child might be Dusty's. As it happens, she doesn't marry Keir but does leave infant daughter Liz with Joe and Edith, then goes into British films and later to Hollywood. Keir gets into the aircraft industry, uncovers the Lockheed kickbacks scandal, uses his knowledge to become a millionaire selling American arms to Europe. At the same time, Joe is an active peace demonstrator, and the battles of the peaceniks and the weapons makers take center stage, with teen-age Liz now joining the fray and remaining at odds with her glamorous mother. The climax finds Liz and Joe at sea attempting to thwart France's atomic tests on the island of Mururoa. Kirkus Review