This is part two of the Settling Accounts tetralogy, the story of World War II fought in a world where the South won the Civil War. The Confederate Army have invaded Ohio, hoping to cut the United States in half and force a surrender. However, neither Confederate victories or the death of the American president have caused the USA to cry uncle. So, the Confederate troops turn eastward, hoping to capture the city of Pittsburgh and cripple US manufacturing capabilities. (That brings up one oddity about this alternate world--everybody worries about losing access to the factories in the East, yet West Coast efforts are rarely mentioned. Were all the West Coast magnates of our world of Confederate stock or something?) Meanwhile, in the CSA, the noose is tightening around the necks of the black community as more and more people are shipped off to the concentration camps. It looks mighty bleak. I can only hope that in the two novels remaining in this series, we might see a happy... well, at least a somewhat just, ending to this tale.
--J. ( )

The alternate World War II between the USA and the CSA continues as the CSA launches an attack on Pennsylvania after its victories in Ohio that culminates in a battle at Pittsburgh that mirrors the real world Battle of Stalingrad. Meanwhile, Jake Featherson's program of eliminating the CSA's black population accelerates.

This book was an improvement on the previous volume because there is a little more action, and a few of the annoying examples of repetition such as Sam Carsten's tendency to sunburn are minimized. There is still a lot of repetition though, and numerous examples of conversations between characters that have to relevance to anything. If all of that had been eliminated, the book could have told the same story in a couple of hundred fewer pages. The underlying story is still fairly interesting, although the viewpoint characters are becoming a bit skewed. By the end of the book there are no characters providing a viewpoint from the Confederate side of the fighting while we still have sequences with characters such as Leonard O'Doull which are basically the same every time and don't have anything really interesting to add to the story. All the characters from Canada are dead or out of Canada, so suddenly Canada has become minor background to the story after being a major part of the last seven books. What keeps this series from being really interesting is Turtledove's need to stick to the actual WWII so closely. It would be more interesting to imagine an original conflict between the two countries using 1940's technology instead of just recreating a battle such as Stalingrad with different names on the participants. Turtledove does depart from history somewhat with the introduction of "people bombers" several decades before they were common in our world, but it is not a change that has a large impact on the overall story. ( )

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