Ah, the penultimate volume of the Timeline-191 series! I am such an addict! By this time, I have to admit that these alternate history books about the ongoing conflict of the United States and Confederate States have devolved into hackwork. You get the same ideas swirling around and around throughout the tale. Highly competent soldiers on the front lines can (and should) get away with mouthing off to their superiors. Confederate tobacco is much superior than the crap the USA produces. The superior numbers and manufacturing capability of the USA can win the war if it's drawn out... unless the CSA manages to split the atom first. So why do I keep reading? Well, I've come this far. 10 volumes as of this book. I want to see how it ends. Who lives? Who dies? And will Jake Featherston get the nasty death that he truly deserves? Guess I'll just have to get the next one to find out. (And pray that Mr. Turtledove hasn't decided to embark on an alternate Cold War epic....)
--J. ( )

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. ( )