19°15′S 146°49′E · Townsville, Queensland · Spring 1942
The army that could have saved them was on the other side of the world.
Singapore has fallen. The American fleet lies at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. And in a cold room in Tokyo, Japan's high command makes the decision real history says they rejected as impossible: to land an army on the Australian mainland.
All ten books are included with Kindle+.
Day 10
The north falls. Australia's veterans are fighting Rommel in the African desert, eleven thousand miles away.
One choice
Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Forsythe trades the cities for time and vanishes into an interior the size of a continent.
One line
He will make war on soldiers. He will never make war on the helpless. Holding that line takes thirty years.
The count passes hand to hand
Five keepers. Thirty years. One unbroken line.
The men who counted the cost on both sides were not listened to until it was far too late. What they kept is handed down, from the red outback to the edge of the world.
- 1Daniel ForsytheThe officer who would not make war on the helpless
- 2Yuki TanakaThe enemy supply officer who counted the same cost
- 3Ken NakamuraThe interpreter who talked the living out of caves
- 4Mira SokolovaBorn on a hard line of the divided world
- 5Anya RostovaThe last keeper of the long account
Books 1 to 5 · 1942 to 1945
The war that never happened
From the burning streets of Townsville and the red silence of the outback to the gravest "what if" of the Pacific war: the invasion of the Japanese home islands.
Book 11942
The Fall of Queensland
The north cannot be held. So he makes a colder choice.
Trade the cities for time, keep the army alive, and vanish into the interior to wage a war the occupier never imagined.
Start here
Book 21943
Red Dust and Rising Sun
The order was clean on paper. Carrying it out would mean slaughtering the helpless.
High command calls them unavoidable incidental losses. Forsythe has two roads, and both of them surrender. Unless he can find a third.
Book 31944
The Darwin Offensive
For two years he asked how to survive. Now the question is how to win.
The heavy war rolls north at last, and Forsythe sends his own men into the towns on foot so the bombs never fall.
Book 41945
The Islands of the Dead
They gave the schoolmaster one grenade for thirty people. They called it mercy.
Eighty thousand defenders dug into caves, and a hundred and fifty thousand civilians in the way. The darkest book, and the hinge on which everything turns.
Book 51945
The Emperor's Shore
Three roads led to the end of the war. The third had never been tried.
A quarter of a million men off the beaches, a terrible instrument tested in the desert, and one captured officer's voice calling his nation home.
End of the first arc
Books 6 to 10 · The divided world
The inheritors of the count
The peace hardens into a divided, dangerous world under the shadow of the atomic instrument. The two who counted grow old, and the count must pass to hands that can carry it on.
Book 6Seven years on
The Borrowed War
Not their war. That is exactly the point.
A proxy war erupts on a far peninsula, and Tanaka is trapped on the wrong side of the line. Forsythe leaves his farm to hold a line on borrowed ground.
Opens the second arc
Book 7Twenty years on
The Last Accounting
One of them is dying, and the count must pass on.
Tanaka's last letter is a summons to a new frontier crisis. Forsythe and Ken Nakamura take up the final inheritance.
Book 8A new generation
The Inheritors
The two who counted are gone. Now it passes to her.
Mira Sokolova never met the founders. To her they are legends, and now the whole of their life's work is hers to carry.
Book 9Thirteen days
The Edge of the World
The restraint held because people chose it. Will they choose it again?
Weapon against weapon, and this time the helpless are everyone. The darkest hour of the age.
Book 10Full circle
The Long Account
From the fall of Queensland to the last accounting, the line held.
Anya Rostova, the fourth to carry it, must read the record from the first entry to the last and close the whole of it.
Series finale
The only immortality such work allows is its passing-on. Hand to hand, world without end.The Last Accounting · Book 7
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Hold the north yourself
The Bitter Pacific begins here
The north falls in ten days. The line holds for thirty years.
Start with The Fall of Queensland and follow the count across ten books, free with Kindle+.
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