The fourth volume of Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes series, The Merchants’ War picks up moments after the end of vol. 3, The Clan Corporate. Miriam/Helge has escaped with her life into world 3, just, with a bit of assistance from her ex-boyfriend/US agent Mike. Others, including the king of Neijwein and Miriam’s betrothed, the brain-damaged younger prince, have not and as a result the allegedly sadistic Crown Prince (who was actually behind the attack) has become king.
The new king immediately places blame on the upstart tinkerers, in other words Miriam’s family, and with support from the older nobility sets out to destroy the worldwalking clans. Mean he may be but not stupid; he’s put a good deal of planning in place to deal with their ability to ‘magically’ appear anywhere they like–except for space already occupied in the destination world.
Miriam is sort of stuck in the other world’s equivalent of Manhattan with no money or appropriate clothing and unable to use the contacts and resources she’d previously established, nor does she have the locket/pattern needed to get back to her home Earth. Which, it seems clear at this stage, is almost but not quite our Earth. She turns for help to a madam involved in the same underground revolutionary group as her Boston pawnbroker friend and gets it, though not without coming close to being murdered as a security risk.
The third leg of this volume is the effort’s of what’s come to be called the Family Trade Operation, the US agency for which Mike now works. Though the incursion his team made into Neijwein just before the palace bombing at the end of the last book wasn’t close to a success, with a badly injured Mike the only team member to get home alive, the FTO is making progress on tracking down the threat claimed by the turncoat Mattias as well as finding a technological answer to worldwalking.
All in all a good read but don’t expect much in the way of answers or endings in The Merchant’s War. Stross says two more volumes are coming in 2008 and 2009 so this is a middle of the story book. For all I know there may be more after those two since here Stross has shifted focus and opened things up so that Miriam is just one main character among several; in fact with only one or two brief exceptions she doesn’t interact with anyone from her family the entire book.
recommended, but be sure to start with the first book, The Family Trade
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