I finally got round to reading In at the Death, the successor to The Grapple.
Whereas my objection to The Grapple was that it mirrored WWII in Europe too much, and especially based the CSA far too rigidly on Nazi Germany, In at the Death has the opposite problem (spoilers follow).
The great powers are throwing atomic bombs all over the place, rather than stopping the war after one or two. And after the USA occupy the CSA, they can’t think of any solutions other than either pulling out or annexing it. I would have thought an obvious solution given what happened after WWII in Europe would have been to form a Coal and Steel Community, tying the USA, the CSA, Canada and Quebec (and perhaps Texas and Mexico) into an ever tighter union, perhaps renamed in the 1990s as the North American Union.
I’m also disappointed no solution is suggested for the remaining CSA blacks, perhaps setting up a new country for them somewhere (that is, mirroring the creation of Israel in OTL).
All in all a disappointing book. I wonder whether it’s truly the final book in this TL, given that so many problems are never resolved at the end. But perhaps that’s because I’m European. Perhaps to an American reader, it makes sense to end the series with a crushing US victory so that a unified USA can be recreated as in OTL, just three generations later.
