Rising Sun is the 11th book in the New England Series set in a universe in which George Washington died at the Battle of Long Island in 1776 and…the Revolutionary War was lost...and the Britannia's domain has literally been an empire on which the sun never sets for most of the last two hundred years!
The Russian foothold in the Alaskan lands has been vanquished, the war with the Triple Alliance is over, almost history; and ‘the West’, specifically the vast former Californian lands of the old Spanish empire of New Granada is a freshly annexed colony of New England. For the first time a native-born Viceroy is to be enthroned as the Governor of the Commonwealth, the war with the Mexicans is over and the conquest of North America from coast to gleaming coast is, after two centuries, complete.
Already the ‘no expense spared’, harum-scarum rush to colonise the West Coast Golden Gate province is under way.
But, of course, at the very moment the British Empire is on the cusp of its finest moment, an ungrateful world is intent on spoiling its party!
But little of this is obvious to Melody Danson and her new family as they begin a new life in Manhattan, or to Kate and Abe Lincoln looking forward to journeying west to a land of new hope and opportunity as the aftermath of the latest battles in the Pacific play out. Thousands of miles away, the dust from Operation Prestige has not, and is unlikely to settle any time soon and the law of unintended consequences has just, taken another unlikely twist!
In the Pacific the opposing navies have exchanged hammer blows but the strategic calculus remains unaltered; the Royal Navy remains outnumbered and on the defensive, faced now by an enemy slowly learning some of the lessons it learned at terrible cost in the Gulf of Spain a year ago. In the Central Pacific there is there an uneasy stand-off, elsewhere European hegemony in the Far East is everywhere in retreat while in the Old Country the government lurches from one crisis to another, its disarray a metaphor for the tensions that many fear will one day erode the Empire from within.
In New England it is the lull before the storm. The East Coast primacy of the First Thirteen, already diminished by the burgeoning powerhouse industry and commerce of the territories of the interior now filling the lands all the way to the Mississippi and beyond, unconstructed by the jurisprudence and the restraints to their trade and development that is so closely guarded by the Legislative Councils of the ‘old colonies’, is about to be rocked by the race to colonise the coast to the west of the Rockies and the Sierra Madre.
Nobody better understands the existential crisis that is slowly brewing in New England as its new Governor, former cavalryman and Texan rancher, George Nathaniel Washington but even he can not foresee the half of the surprises the future has in store for the vast, febrile commonwealth he now rules…
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