This book continues the long-running Timeline-191 series in which the Confederate States gained independence in the Civil War and have had numerous wars with the United States ever since. The Settling Accounts series recounts an alternate version of World War II with the USA and CSA on opposite sides. In this third volume, the US has repelled the Confederate invasion and is now beginning an offensive into Confederate territory, which ends up looking a lot like Sherman's plan in our actual Civil War. Meanwhile, Confederate leader Jake Featherston's plan to eliminate all the blacks in the south continues with the expansion of the concentration camps.

This book is unlikely to be of interest to anyone who has not read the previous books in at least the Settling Accounts series, as it has nothing that distinguishes it individually. It continues most of the flaws of the earlier books, especially repetitiveness, although thankfully some of the more common repeated phrases have been mostly eliminated. We still get to hear many times about how bad US cigarettes are though. The biggest issue with the book is just general bloat. Most viewpoint character segments have one little nugget of information to provide that moves the overall story forward, but they spend five pages doing it by padding the segment out with some usually irrelevant conversations. There are whole segments such as the Loanard O'Doull ones which seem to serve no purpose at all. The book also continues to imitate WWII too closely. The Confederates develop new weapons such as rockets at this point in time because that is what the Nazis had at a similar point in WWII, not because it is logical that the Confederates would have a lot of skilled rocket scientists. Towards the end of the book, momentum is starting to build up in the story, and I hoped that some surprises would be coming, but instead the story stalled out and very little happens in the last couple of hundred pages. Despite the flaws, I did find this book somewhat more interesting than the first two books of Settling Accounts. Hopefully, the final volume will have some surprises, but I am not too confident that it will. ( )

Although I enjoyed the book, I did so because I enjoy the series; the book itself doesn't particularly stick out in my mind. As the third book in the Settling Accounts series and the tenth in the Southern Victory series, The Grapple does a fine job of advancing the plot, continuing the parallels between the Jews in our universe and the African Americans in that universe, and continuing the stories of the characters we have grown to love and/or hate. However, the book itself isn't anything special outside of the series. ( )