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| Necessary Evil |
Necessary Evil, by Ian Tregillis, wraps up a series that almost didn’t get published. Last year, Tregillis wrote to explain the long delay between the first book, Bitter Seeds, and the second, The Coldest War. The first book set up a seemingly unwinnable war between a girl who can see the future and her gang of psychically enhanced Nazi weapons and English warlocks who are using the power of demons. The Coldest War kicked things up a notch by having the Soviets wade into the conflict while the price of magic keeps escalating. When we last left our hero, Raybould Marsh, and Gretel the clairvoyant monster jumping from the end of the world into a new time line. Marsh gets a literal second chance to put things right.
In Necessary Evil, Marsh has to fight World War II all over again but twenty years older. Almost immediately, the war starts to take a different course from the one Marsh remembers. Not only does Marsh have to take out Gretel’s group of fellow mutants and keep the English warlocks from making deals they don’t fully understand, but he also has to deal with his twenty years younger self–who is far to smart for his own good. Tregillis handles his tangled and ambitious plot amazingly well. I couldn’t put the book down once I reached the halfway point. I had to see how Marsh would put this impossible situation right.
As I read, I realized that this whole trilogy was all about consequences. The phrase “necessary evil” is repeated throughout this book as Marsh and his few allies have to balance many lives against the end of the world. There’s no way it can be resolved without bloodshed. At times, the stakes are so high the book reads like the unsolvable ethical dilemmas from a philosophy class. The choices Marsh ends up making are heartbreaking and yet, they’re the right ones. This is an incredible series.