'Before there was James Bond, there was Gregory Sallust.' Tina Rosenberg, Salon.com

Black August is chronologically the tenth in Dennis Wheatley's bestselling Gregory Sallust series, albeit the first title published in the series, featuring the debonair spy Gregory Sallust, a forerunner to Ian Fleming's James Bond.

Black August is set in a terrifying future Europe on the verge of collapse; financial breakdown and revolution, civilian panic, street-fighting and an uncontrolled exodus from the cities to the countryside, where bands of starving people wander, pillaging for food.

Out of the terror and the bloodshed steps the former British secret agent Gregory Sallust, to take the leadership of a group of men and women seeking only to survive: to lead them through hardship and hazard to a rural settlement which they fortify against invasion, and which, at first, seems reasonably secure.