Excellent first novel that makes World War II go kablooey. British secret agent Raybould Marsh returns from Civil War Spain with a burned reel of film which shows superhuman Nazis at work. Monstrous experiments on children have created soldiers who can fly, set things on fire and walk through walls, To comprehend and combat this new threat he recruits a college friend, trained since childhood to be a warlock, and who once, unwisely, allowed him to glimpse the reality of the Eidolons, vast, omnipresent, all-powerful beings who demand a blood price for every intervention.
Soon, the Nazi war machine has overwhelmed Europe with unnatural speed, leaving England weak, vulnerable and ripe for invasion. To combat the colossal evil of the super-Nazis, the British Warlocks must resort to increasingly awful acts of their own to satisfy the Eidolons, and there is a real sense that as the trilogy progresses, the ultimate threat will come from these dealings. By the end of the book, an even greater menace is on Britain's doorsteps, and even more questionable methods are being employed to forestall it. Watching and manipulating people and events is the terrifying, sociopathic seer Gretel, whose knowledge of the future is the most dreadful power of all.
Tregillis drenches his mad science and supernatural flourishes with the general awfulness of the War without lingering the battlefields or visiting the Camps, managing to situate his fictional variations within the reality without one, as it were, invading the other. Dark, well-written, exciting and pretty genuinely unputdownable, Bitter Seeds manages to be both epic and pacy, with great characters and manages to mess it up as science fiction, fantasy and horror without missing a beat.