Settling the Accounts: The Grapple
Harry Turtledove
Del Rey, Aug 2006, $26.95
ISBN: 0345457250

When the Confederacy won the War Between the States, the country broke into the USA and the CSA. During the Great War, the USA defeated the CSA and occupied the land until it was disarmed. Over time and in secrecy, the Confederacy rebuilt its militia and humiliated by its defeat enabled Jake Featherston and his Freedom party to come into power by promising that the CSA would never suffer the debasement of defeat ever again to their enemy to the north.

In 1941 President Featherston declares war on the USA; for two years his forces win victory after victory pushing deep into Ohio and Pennsylvania. However, by 1943, the USA armies begin to repel the invaders from occupied land and soon head into Kentucky and Tennessee. Negroes, who were ruthlessly placed in concentration camps hope the USA will free them. Fearing for the CSA, Featherston places his funding on a new weapon of mass destruction, a bomb like none ever seen before.

SETTLING ACCOUNTS: THE GRAPPLE is Harry Turtledove at his best. Jake is a Hitleresque dictator with his Freedom party a Nazi replica and the Negroes treated like the Jews in Germany. The novel is loaded with action especially battle scenes shown from differing perspectives, which makes the cast seem purposely insignificant as individuals are part of a cast of zillions while death is a statistic of war. Thus the war is the main character in Mr. Turtledove's excellent alternative historical thriller.

Harriet Klausner