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I had a hard time deciding how to rate this. Cherie Priest has a beautiful writing style and her alternate-history world interests me. I especially like the idea that the Civil War has stretched on for twenty-plus years, with all its implications. Mercy, the protagonist, is a Confederate nurse whose husband died in Andersonville (a Confederate POW camp for Union soldiers), and her perspective of the Union as the wrong side makes for a great story. "Wrong side," not "bad guys," because there are plenty of good guys on both sides of the divide. The story of the rotters, begun in Boneshaker, expands beyond Seattle as a division of Mexican soldiers goes missing in northern Texas, only to reappear as a growing horde of ravenous undead. The scene where the rotters attack the train Mercy is traveling on is deliciously horrible and creepy. Priest's skill with description and world-building is superb, as usual.

On the other hand, this felt very much like a string of events rather than a real plot. Mercy has to travel from Richmond, Virginia, to Seattle in Washington Territory, to answer her estranged father's plea for her presence. That's a lot of ground to cover when you can't fly there directly, and the changing war front means the route is even more circuitous than usual. But the story doesn't really begin until Mercy boards the war-engine Dreadnought, which happens more than a third of the way through; her earlier journey is a series of stops and short journeys by dirigible and train, providing color and background but nothing in terms of plot development. In most other books, this would have been tedious; I like Priest's writing enough that I was willing to stick with it, and the rest of the book made up for any flaws in the beginning.