Review: The Tilian Cure is a fitting ending to a wild post-apocalyptic adventure
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 11, 2014
The Tilian Cure, Tom Calen’s final installment in The Pandemic Sequence, is a satisfying end to an unnerving journey.  With the wounds that book 2 created still fresh and tender, I dove head first into book 3 and never looked back.Our good old friends, The Tils, are back and more ferocious than ever.  After Michelle Lafkin’s dreaded discovery in the labs of Guantanamo Bay, we are now aware that The Tils’ intelligence levels are steadily increasing and that the evil powers that be have not only discovered a way to hide this from the rest of their fellow mankind, but manipulate The Tils to their advantage.  After suffering the serious loss of Andrew on the mainland, our broken team of survivors must press on and finish what they started.  Mike and the gang are reunited with the traitor, Lisa, who is broken as well.  We realize as the book starts off that she is just as much of a victim as the rest of them.  She was forced to help create The Tilian Virus as a bio-weapon for the government, the lives of her family threatened if she were to stop helping.  Can Lisa really be blamed for the creation of the virus and the loss of so many precious lives and society itself?Paul, assuming Lisa for dead after the mass casualties of Book 2 resulting from a rebel gang of marauders known as “The Horde”, has taken over as leader for this same group that has stolen everything from him after raising a mutiny and killing the villainous leader.  The once destructive group now flourishes as a dystopian wilderness society under Paul’s direction and Paul is preparing the group for a rendezvous with the USS Mohawk, unaware of the traitorous ship’s true intentions to murder anyone that isn’t Lisa returning with the ARC, the mysterious device that controls The Tils.Calen returns to the first book’ style of chapter swapping and point of view changes, not in the sense of past, present, future, but geographically and story wise.  Book 3 has a lot going on and Calen successfully tells several stories through the eyes of several different characters that all meld together in the end for the dramatic conclusion.With the now intelligent and strategic Tils hunting them and gathering their own infected masses, Paul and The Horde must prepare for the biggest battle of their lives before meeting up with the ship that will inevitably murder them all.  Michelle and Matt Locke, our newest addition to the team, return to Cuba to retrieve more ARCs to put a stop to the Tils only to find the island on fire and the ferocious infected on the loose, destroying everything that the survivors worked so hard to rebuild.  Michelle and Matt will stop at nothing to put an end to the corrupt government officials behind all the mayhem who plan on further ruining an already crumbling world.  Mike, Erik, and Lisa must reach Paul before he unknowingly seals his fate at the rendezvous point all the while trying to survive the infected that now hunt them.The Tilian Cure is anything but a kiddie ride at the amusement park, it is an all-out roller coaster ride of carnage.  In my previous review I questioned whether or not I thought our survivors were prepared for the trials that awaited them in book 3.  I questioned if they had gone soft.  Without a doubt in my mind I can safely say that they have in no way forgotten what it means to be a true survivor.  If anything, Mike, Michelle, Erik, Lisa, Paul and the rest of the crew are merely getting back to their roots.  These are hardened people who are determined to take back the world they’ve all lost, and they will allow nothing to stop them as they risk everything to try.  This book is war in every sense.  War against The Tils, war against corruption, war against the apocalypse and it is relentless.Whether or not Calen intended for Michelle Lafkin to be the true hero of the series in the end, he did an amazing job of evolving her character throughout the events of The Pandemic Sequence.  There were points, with any character that one overly focuses on, that I found a lot of the scenarios in which she was placed to be very unrealistically survivable, but I forced myself to look past that and accept the action/adventure heroine for what she was becoming.  As much as Mike Allard was portrayed to be the hero in the first book and the ending of the second book, and as much as Calen tried to force him to be the hero in this third installment, Michelle Lafkin has definitely taken center stage.  And it’s very refreshing.The one and only thing that would have killed this entire trilogy for me had I not found the books so well done overall, would be the ending to this book.  It was a cliché; executed like a fairy tale, making it very cheesy for me.  And that’s all I’ll say without giving anything away.  But overall, The Tilian Cure is a fitting ending to a wild post-apocalyptic adventure and deserves its 4.5 star rating.