Review: Starts strong, but believability fades
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 30, 2014
Especially in Book 0 of this series, there is a strong sense of action with some interesting twists and unanswered questions as the world falls apart, seemingly in an instant. Piperbrook has a good storytelling ability and he keeps his characters interesting as, piece by piece, the apocalypse of this set piece emerges.Unfortunately, once you get deep into Books 2 and 3, things start becoming predictable and trite. For some reason, our heroes lose all sense of the scale of the disaster upon them, and when bad guys show up, they take such decisive action as "Stop or I'll shoot!" or "Hold it right there!" Since all the bad guys have been well defined by this point, for the love of God, shoot first and ask questions later. The author uses these kinds of trite setups far too often in the later books in the series. He also depends way too much on the "enter a dark building, artificially build suspense, get attacked" premise.And of course, there is the larger believability question: Supposedly the "contamination" has hit only the American Southwest. What, is the rest of the country blissfully ignorant of the fact that communication and transportation has suddenly died from Phoenix to Austin? The author might as well have put a dome over the desert where all this takes place; it would have been more logical.Editing is generally crisp with one comical exception: People bleed like a sieve, not like a civ. One wonders where these indie authors "learned" some of these bizarre homonym errors.I'll buy Book 4 in the series in hopes that, by returning to the characters of Book 0, there might be a tighter, more realistic plot.