So good news!

This Fall, Ian W. Toll released his second book in the trilogy, the sequel then to Pacific Crucible. It is called Conquering Tide, and covers the war from the Invasion of Guadalcanal to mid 1944.

You also have what is essentially required reading for the seminal modern work on Midway, Shattered Sword by Parschall and Tully, written mostly from the Japanese perspective it serves as a very good narrative account to balance our primarily American perspective, as well as filling in a lot of previous faults in how the IJN war machine planned and conducted itself.

For lighter books Hornfischer is a good author to look at, his most popular work is for sure Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, about Laffey-3 and Leyte Gulf. However I would argue it is actually his inferior work, straying too much towards hero worship. His other work, Neptune's Inferno, is on the US Navy at Guadalcanal, and the surface forces in particular, is so well regarded it is currently on the CNO's Reading List.

And finally if you ever saw Top Gun growing up and though being a US Navy fighter pilot was the embodiment of all that was COOL then have we got the books for you.

In the 80's John Lundstrum put together an incredible duology collectively called "The First Team" which is an incredibly detailed series about the US carrier fighter squadrons through the first year of the war.