Review: Suspenseful, well-edited, unrealistic but interesting hard-edged post-apocalyptic tale
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 9, 2013
Suspenseful story of a family man trying to survive with his family after a virulent infection wipes out most of the world's population.  He was not a "prepper" and was caught off guard and unprepared for survival. After a series of horrific events, he then evolves into a new kind of person ( see below for more under SPOILER alert). Character development is good, the plot and action sequences progress quickly making it hard to stop reading, you care about the characters, and there are no horrible typos. I liked that the story started out enticingly telling the reader certain key facts coming in the plot, though it is not readily apparent what exactly happened until you read on.I enjoyed the read, though there was not much prepping information beyond the obvious if you have read this genre before.The story was also a little PC, perhaps inadvertently, in that while there were diverse good guys and victims  (whites, blacks, Latinos, an Asian,  and briefly even a couple lesbians) but oddly as far as I could tell, all the bad guys and thugs seemed to be white. I think the book would appeal to an ethnically diverse population of readers. The family gun training scenes also seemed a little slow for readers who already know something about gun basics.SPOILER commentary: in the second section of the book the character evolves from an inept, out of shape family man making tactical mistake after mistake, into the Trashman, a disciplined tough guy going around satisfyingly getting rid of unsavory characters to help clean up the world, and get revenge.  However, the short training period he had to prepare, though intense, did not seem long enough to develop the difficult physical and mental discipline and skills needed to function in the highly skilled capacity the story portrayed, along the lines of a Special Ops soldier, especially considering he was trained while suffering from an infected abdominal bullet wound.I thought this book was better-written than Disaster, one of his other earlier  books.I look forward to reading more by this talented author.