A believer in contingency above all else in history, Tsouras makes a good case for how the British enabling of the Confederate naval war could have become the flash point for the entry of the European powers into the American Civil War. For what is essentially an extended data-dump with a novelistic narrative it's quite readable, with much of the story being told from the perspective of George H. Sharp, who in real life was the senior intelligence officer of the the Army of the Potomac and who in this story gets the chance to form a Central Intelligence Bureau.

Anyway, I can easily see Harry Turtledove fans getting a lot of enjoyment out of this work; I certainly did, and I look forward to the follow-on books.

However, Tsouras does himself no favors by adopting a snide tone in his introduction, such as dismissing the "idiocies of Karl Marx and his disciples" or citing the "sublime message of a Galilean rabbi" as one of his examples of contingency in action. Irreligious left-wingers read alternate history novels too after all! If I didn't appreciate Tsouras' previous work I probably would have tossed the book aside right there as simply shaping up to be some sort of annoying polemic. This is not to mention that since Marx and Engels were great commentators on period international affairs they would make useful characters in this series; just saying. ( )