In the North American Confederacy . . . People are free--really free. Free to do as they please, whether it be starting a business, running for elected office, or taking target practice in the back forty. There's not a whole lot of government, nor is there a lot of crime, because everyone who wants to carries a gun, and isn't afraid to use it. But someone has bombed the Endicott Building, killing hundreds of people, and Win Bear, the only licensed detective in the confederacy, has to find out who did this dastardly deed, and why. Because whoever did it has already shown their willingness to commit more terrorist acts, no matter how many people are hurt. And that can't go on, or soon the confederacy will be just as the bad old United States--and that is something they want to avoid at all costs. Win Bear makes his living as a detective in the North American Confederacy, an alternate America without taxes, government, or police. When a group of dissidents, the Franklinites, launches a campaign of terror to force governmental order upon the population, Bear takes matters into his own hands and declares war on his enemy. The sequel to The Probability Broach continues the adventures of a likable and resourceful hero who stumbled upon another world and chose to make his home in it. Smith's libertarian slant may limit the book's appeal, but general readers may overlook this issue thanks to the fast-paced storytelling and sharp-tongued, folksy prose. For large sf collections. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. In the sequel to The Probability Broach (1980), private investigator Win Bear and militia captain Will Sanders face a statist plot against the libertarian paradise of their creator's alternate America. That plot first shows up in the form of illicit Clark Gable-Carole Lombard videos, proceeds to massive terrorist incidents, and eventually emerges as a far-flung conspiracy designed to create pressure for a government through hostility to immigrants. Smith has a knack for pacing and a fair ear for satire, as indicated by such characters as a pair of brothers named Buckley and Bennett Williams. Furthermore, the book's centenarian Lucy Kropotkin and sapient dolphins and gorillas make as many telling wisecracks as is expected in a Smith opus. Nobody connected with the book is to blame for its release at just this moment in history, but because of it, the yarn's high body count, terrorist incidents, and such scenes as that of an 11-year-old girl buying weapons and drugs may raise hackles outside Smith's hard-core libertarian fandom. Roland Green Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “L. Neil Smith’s Probability Broach. . . contained ideas I wish could be shouted to the world, ideas that come from the American heritage of freedom and which could bring still greater individual liberty, greater technical progress.”—Vernor Vinge, author of A Fire upon the Deep "There's something tremendously attractive about the idea of a world where what you do is nobody's business but your own, and that's the kind of world that L. Neil Smith, award winning libertarian author and spokesperson, created in The Probability Broach and returns us to in The American Zone ."—Ernest Lilley SFRevu "The most freewheeling of the new libertarians."-- Reason Magazine " The Probability Broach is a brilliant, subversive novel."— Prometheus L. Neil Smith is the two time winner of the Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian Fiction for his novels Pallas (1993) and The Probability Broach (1980). As founder and National Coordinator of the Libertarian Second Amendment Caucus, publisher of the on-line magazine The Libertarian Enterprise , and a Life member of the National Rifle Association, Smith is renowned for his prominence in the Libertarian movement, of which he has been a part of for more than thirty-five years. Author of more than twenty books, Smith has been hailed for his ability to combine adventure, humor, and rivetingly original political concepts to create more compellingly than any other writer, novels that embody Libertarian concepts. He currently resides in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his wife and daughter.