End of Summer
Series: Seasons of Man, Book 1
By: S.M. Anderson / Narrated By: Jay Snyder
Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
Cuz the current pandemic makes me hanker for even more pandemic schtuff… It’s the end of the woooooorld!!! :)
It’s the end of summer, and all slacker virologist wannabes are scooting outta the lab to get some coffee and bask in the sun at the beach.
Ooops—one young slacker used petroleum-based lotion underneath his gloves, broke down the talcum, and he’s now stepped on virus-laden particles that drifted to the floor. And so the Chesapeake flu—a pneumatic ebola variant—has been unleashed. Ahhhh, carefree and headstrong youth! Whaddareya gonna do?
And so begins End of Summer, what is kinda sorta an okay Apocalypse Thriller when one is NOT rolling one’s eyes.
Let’s begin with our hero, Jason, who NATurally is ex-military, a hardened vet who thought he put his fraught days behind him but who currently has to bury his young pregnant wife… but not before she, with her dying words, tells him to LIVE and to Save Humanity. Could anything BE more hokey? Ahhhh (again), but the mourning guy, who mightily wishes for death, can’t seem to help himself as he goes out into the world… namely just down the street where his neighbor was a Prepper.
There he finds Prepper Neighbor Dagman (And his wife), prepped for everything but just couldn’t danged fight off the disease and died died died. -BUT- Wouldn’t you know he left all sorts of wonderful stuff like a LOADED pantry, a solar-powered house that has a generator that kicks in when solar power dips below a certain point, and guns Guns GUNS GALORE. Oh, yeah, and plenty of vehicles all loaded with gas.
And so Jason is set to save the world. Which is good because the near-wiping-out of humanity ALWAYS brings out the worst in some people, and Jason finds that an old FEMA center is now Ground Zero for a nefarious gang of creeps. These creeps NATurally enslave women (“Ya wanna work in the Ballroom? I can throw you back there if you keep crackin’ wise…!”) as sex workers, and the Head Nefarious Honcho of this nefarious gang was a sheriff in the old days but who has since become power-hungry and a trifle paranoid and nuts.
Jason starts picking off these losers, one by one, and the Nefarious Creeps dub him The Ninja for his deadliness and stealthy moves. NATurally.
Again, NATurally, Jason comes across a teen boy he needs to save, brutalized women he HAS to save, a Black dude he SHAMElessly recruits (And saves from a nasty life), all the while doing bad stuff to bad people.
Now, all this sounds like I haaaated the book, but actually I didn’t, not at all. It was deftly written, had plenty of tension and suspense which sometimes KILLED me as I do NOT do thriller/suspense well at all (Toes curl, I chew fingernails ragged, etc etc etc). Plus, and this I commend most highly: This is the first in a series, but it does not, in no way, end on a cliffhanger which I think is the laziest and most gutless way to end a book in a series (Yeah I’m calling you out, Michael J. Sullivan with your Age of Myth … which I look forward to reviewing with a jaundiced eye in the near future… ). Oh sure, sure, there are dangling threads, but I’m kinda sorta looking forward to picking up those threads and listening to the next audiobook in the series.
Ahhhhh (Yet again!), the AUDIObook—narrated by Jay Snyder, he who is a noted veteran narrator of thrillers, mysteries, apocalypse books extraordinaire. What can I say? Okay, let’s go with this: The man shaaaamelessly flexes his masculine muscle here. No, the women don’t exACTly come off as wimps—they’re not written that way by author S.M. Anderson—but the characters who are given shine time are the men. Be it Jason picking off bad guys one by one, or Pro the youngun’ he saves but who can spot which houses will have guns, or the nefarious creeps who’ll just as soon shoot each other as work with one another.
Yup, a man’s man kinda book. But, hey, what can this 54-year old woman say?
He had me when he saved the dog…!
P.S.? Just a note to the author: After this current pandemic with its lockdowns and panic buying, and after living through a Winter Storm from Hell here in Central Texas? Dude, I do NOT know where you got the idea that canned goods aren’t scavenged but remain as a viable food source for future use. I can say with complete knowledge and sincerity—Canned goods are the FIRST to fly off the shelves!
… just saying…
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