I lump these two together because they are both e-book only offerings from Robert Conroy. I read them both recently (due to lack of better options, more than anything else).
"Castro's Bomb" is the more plausible of the two, depicting as it does a Cuban attack on Guantanamo base. The tension in the novel is fairly high, since the titular bomb is a nuclear one stolen from the Russians (and controlled by Che Guevara, of all people). Interestingly, the war, although won by the USA, shows the powers that be in DC that dirt poor people who have been exploited by dictators will all too willingly embrace Communism and fight for it, so JFK decides to not get deeply involved in Vietnam because of it.
"North Reich" is a thought experiment put into print, because the PODs behind it are far fetched, to put it mildly. Basically, Conroy decided to show a war between the Nazis and the USA in N. America and didn't really care about how he got there. The basic premise is that Germany drives Russia beyond the Urals, and forces Britain into an armistice, which includes a provision that the Nazis get to put a garrison into Ontario (!). The whole thing was kept secret by those perfidious Brits and the Germans basically sent a bunch of ships to Canada and unloaded them, surprising the yanks, who weren't able to do anything about it until it was too late. There is a real lack of tension in the novel because it's said over and over that the USA can't fail to win while fighting on it's own turf, and that Germany has too long a supply chain... and sure enough, that's just how it works out.
The most annoying thing about both these two books was the lack of decent editing. Both are riddled with 'misplaced word' errors, i.e., those where a perfectly good word is used in error, 'once' for 'one', 'and' for 'an', etc. Also there's some duplication of words and phrases that an editor would have caught. One of the first chapters in North Reich uses the phrase 'young lovely young frauleins'...
"Castro's Bomb" is the more plausible of the two, depicting as it does a Cuban attack on Guantanamo base. The tension in the novel is fairly high, since the titular bomb is a nuclear one stolen from the Russians (and controlled by Che Guevara, of all people). Interestingly, the war, although won by the USA, shows the powers that be in DC that dirt poor people who have been exploited by dictators will all too willingly embrace Communism and fight for it, so JFK decides to not get deeply involved in Vietnam because of it.
"North Reich" is a thought experiment put into print, because the PODs behind it are far fetched, to put it mildly. Basically, Conroy decided to show a war between the Nazis and the USA in N. America and didn't really care about how he got there. The basic premise is that Germany drives Russia beyond the Urals, and forces Britain into an armistice, which includes a provision that the Nazis get to put a garrison into Ontario (!). The whole thing was kept secret by those perfidious Brits and the Germans basically sent a bunch of ships to Canada and unloaded them, surprising the yanks, who weren't able to do anything about it until it was too late. There is a real lack of tension in the novel because it's said over and over that the USA can't fail to win while fighting on it's own turf, and that Germany has too long a supply chain... and sure enough, that's just how it works out.
The most annoying thing about both these two books was the lack of decent editing. Both are riddled with 'misplaced word' errors, i.e., those where a perfectly good word is used in error, 'once' for 'one', 'and' for 'an', etc. Also there's some duplication of words and phrases that an editor would have caught. One of the first chapters in North Reich uses the phrase 'young lovely young frauleins'...