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This book begins twenty years after the end of Bitter Seeds, which was something of a surprise to me--I'd sort of expected it to pick right up from where that one ended. But the time jump makes a lot of other things possible, both in advancing the plot and in creating a different kind of tension. Twenty years down the road, in the alternate future that develops from the psychic experiments of the Reichsbehoerde and the English warlocks' tampering with evil cosmic forces, Russia has become a world power, America never got over the Depression, and Britain's resources have been completely drained from having to fight the Commies unaided. Twenty years down the road, Will and Marsh's situations have changed: Will has dried out, cleaned up, and married an amazing woman; Marsh and Liv's marriage has completely fallen apart; and for both of them, Milkweed is just a bad memory. But since Klaus and his insane, precognitive sister Gretel are still alive, they can't stay free of that memory for long.

A twenty-year gap between novels is normally frustrating to me, but Tregillis did a good job of extrapolating that future from the stuff he set up in the first book. It's painful to see what's happened to everyone, but not unexpected. I found myself in much greater sympathy with Will than before, and I liked him best of all in the first book, so that was a nice surprise. Gretel is every bit as bitchy and evil as before, but now we get to see some of how her precognitive ability works--through her past self "remembering" stuff she experiences in the future. It turns out that knowing this just makes her seem even more bitchy and evil, particularly when she makes friends with Liv, gets her to confide in her...it's the moment where Marsh might be most justified in killing Gretel, and his reason for not doing so is the only one that could stop him throttling her.

I finished the book full of excitement for the next one. Tregillis's use of tension, and his orchestration of events, meant that the unhappiness of his characters and the sheer wrongness of the world allowed Gretel's final solution to be not only logical, but an exciting prelude to the conclusion of the series. I sincerely hope it's not going to take another gazillion years* for it to be published.

*Yes, I realize it's only been two years since Bitter Seeds came out. To me it feels more like five. Which in literary time might as well be a gazillion.