Harry Turtledove wrote at least one really good book, and increasingly I find myself thinking, only one really good book. The good book was the Guns Of the South, a time travel book in which Afrikaans supremacists, smarting at the loss of apartheid come back to 1863 and give the Confederates a whole bunch of AK47s in the hope that a victorious CSA will make a world where slavery's a going concern and so the idea of white people's 'natural' domination over the darker skinned remains acceptable into the 21st century.
It manages to present not only a rollicking adventure story, but also some fairly cogent ideas about the attitudes of the common southern soldiery, only a few of whom are fighting to keep the slaves in their place. If there's a flaw it's that pretty much everyone except the time travellers is entirely nice. It's been a while since I read it, but I seem to remember that even the founder of the Klu Klux Klan comes round to a liberal position as soon as he finds out the degree to which he's been manipulated.
Since then Turtledove's books have become increasingly long winded, formulaic and plain Alternate History, lacking any time travel elements. A twelve volume history of a (different) victorious South as it slides throught the first and second world wars is a fine example of his current style, which seems to involve less speculation that one would really like, and rather more taking real events and putting a gloss over them. So a corporal in the defeated southern army comes to lead a party devoted to getting his nation back on it's feet while ensuring that the traitors who stabbed them in the back get sent to camps. Negroes rather than Jews, artillery rather than infantry, but it's not a clever bit of parallel, it's just recasting. The whole series was full of that, be glad that I am not going to go on.
Sometimes this style can work, but generally only when things are kept snappy, which is to say, kept to a single book. I quite liked the one about the few surviving Jews in a post Hitler reich, but at the point it became clear that the big events were all glasnost/Yeltsin then it became predictable, and all the suspense was left hanging on who'd win a game of bridge, a challenge for even the best writers. And being honest, Turtledove is not one of the elite.
So here we have what looked at first like it was a snappy-ish pair of books positing a second world war starting with Chamberlain standing up for Czechoslovakia. Oh and someone other than Franco running the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. If these two events are connected then I've not grasped why.
To get the good stuff out of the way: the books bounce along at a fair old pace. They're not demanding, not trying to be. There's also a pleasing preparedness to kill off viewpoint characters. No-one is safe.
Unfortunately the bounce along just helps show up the author's weaknesses. There's a strange sense that each section is there to establish a single point. God knows it's not characterisation. All his characters talk exactly the same, all have the same annoying little tics. There really is the sense that the book starts off as a Word document plan and just gets filled in. Do all writers work that way? Most don't make it that obvious.
And then there's the dread that occurs about three quarters of the way through the book. Oh Lord, there's too much still to wrap up. There's that character who's been hanging about for two books and done bugger all. This isn't a snappy two parter, it's another bloody extended opus. More of this rubbish.
Thank God they were library books, I'd hate to have paid for them.
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