The American Zone was a good way to end out the North American Confederate series. Nearly as good as the first. It really can stand on its own. Certainly, no reason to read the rest of the series, particularly the barely even relevant books 3-8. That being said it is certainly a product of its time> Being written at the tail end of 2001 there is a more than mild obsession with terrorism and the possibility that the terrorists aren't who they seem to be but actually folks who want to create a leviathan state. I suspect that L. Neil Smith is, or at least was at the time, a so-called 9/11 truther. Regardless the story is intriguing. Our hero Win-Bear is saved by his healer wife far more times than should be justified for any red-blood American. And even the open-minded confederates start blaming the terror plots on immigrants, like those from the USA and other alternate realities, after all they didn't have these issues before there was an "American Zone." A few thigs do seem a bit farfetched, like that one of our newcomers finds a market for troll dolls because they never came to this reality, but somehow no one has thought to bring all the gold from all the other realities to debase their precious metal currency. Oh and of course there is Smith's regular obsession where we get more descriptions of a character's firearms than we do of the characters' character.