The Pillars of Hercules is the third book in the Timeline 10/27/62 series set in a world in which the Cuban Missile Crisis went bad, and the Swinging Sixties did not happen.

The Ancient Greeks called the Straits of Gibraltar the "Pillars of Hercules". The Rock of Gibraltar was the northern pillar; Monte Hacho in Ceuta, its probable southern analogue. To the ancients, the "Pillars of Hercules" delineated the western end of the known Mediterranean world. Beyond lay the limitless, impassable vastness of the Atlantic wherein lay monsters....

It is December, 1963, and the tensions that have been simmering since the October war came to a boil in an atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion so poisonous that nobody in England or Washington, DC, realize that in the background, there is a third, malignant force at work.

When the CIA is implicated in the attempted assassination of the British royal family, a United States aircraft subsequently attacks two British destroyers off the coast of northern Spain and takes part in a devastating surprise raid on the Maltese Archipelago. The belligerence of General Franco's government over Gibraltar and the sabre-rattling of the new Fascist government of Italy suddenly assume the proportions of a Machiavellian-American plot to drive the final nail into the coffin of the British Empire.

In England, the hard-pressed United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration is struggling to feed and house its survivors, and every time it tries to talk to the Kennedy administration, nobody is available to take its call.