Settling Accounts: Return Engagement
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| Author | Harry Turtledove |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Settling Accounts series |
| Genre(s) | Alternate History |
| Publisher | |
| Released | August 2004 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback & Hardback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-345-45723-4 |
| Followed by | Drive to the East |
Return Engagement is the first book of Harry Turtledove's Settling Accounts series of alternate history novels. It follows a Second World War waged on American soil between the United States and the Confederate States.
This series is part of a larger series of novels. For convenience's sake, many Turtledove fans refer to this as Timeline-191, after Robert E. Lee's Special Order 191, or as the Southern Victory series.
[edit] Plot summary
Following the return of the occupied states of Kentucky and Houston to the Confederacy in early 1941, President Jake Featherston breaks his solemn vow and re-militarizes them, essentially declaring war against the United States in act if not in word. US President Al Smith hurries to prepare for war, but his country is sent reeling by the Confederate attack into Ohio on June 22, 1941.
The Yankees under General Abner Dowling and Colonel Irving Morrell fight desperately but by 1942 the Confederate Army has reached the shores of Lake Erie and cut the country in two. Meanwhile, the Mormons in Utah have once again revolted, prompting a swift response from the US Army. A US counterattack in Virginia bogs down, and the Confederates are preparing a second offensive for the summer of 1942 when Al Smith is killed in a bombing raid on the capital city of Philadelphia. A shaken Charlie La Follette is sworn in as President of a nation fighting for its survival.
Meanwhile in the Confederacy the murderous persecution of Blacks is escalating towards a full-scale Genocide, similar to our timeline's Holocaust. The fact that La Follette's analogue in our timeline was involved in prosecuting Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg Trials might be a deliberate hint of where Turtledove eventually intends to lead the series. Another hint of things to come is provided when Featherston makes a strategic blunder in rejecting the offer of a physics professor to start research towards producing Nuclear Weapons, believing that the professor just wants government money to finance an abstruse scientific project - while it is hinted that the US does start a version of the Manhattan Project, located in this case in the state of Washington and overseen by Franklin Roosevelt - in this world an Assistant Secretary of War harboring no presidential ambitions.
