World of Trouble
Series: The Last Policeman, Book 3
By: Ben H. Winters / Narrated By: Peter Berkrot
Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
Best of the Trilogy—and might I add: Simply Lovely…!
I KNOW! Who the heck uses the word: Lovely for an End of the World detective novel?!
Especially as things start off all WhizBang with a crazed woman spazzing all over Hank Palace, our Detective Extraordinaire. There’s dust, cosmic asteroid dust that’s choking her as she waits for the end of the world, as she flails, isolated in a world run amok.
This is just the setup for the final installment in a Trilogy I’d come to love. Yeh yeh yeh, I griped mightily about the first book, The Last Policeman as it was sooo shaky a premise: Newly-minted Detective Palace (Once a cop but promoted cuz, dude! everyone else, facing certain death from an upcoming asteroid strike, is off living wild and free, or just, well, floundering, thereby leaving an opening for Detective…) comes upon a dangling corpse. Instead of suicide (As a lot of people wanna just get death over with), Hank had surmised that it was actually murder… due to the guy’s belt being odd. Hmmm… very shaky premise indeed and most CERtainly NOT a showstopper, er, showSTARTer…
Things picked up a bit o’ speed with Countdown City, what with the MULtitude of responses to imminent death that people could come up with. It also showed us that, yup, Hank attracts violent mishaps like nobody’s business.
Which brings me to my oooonly quibble about the series: Jiminy H. Crickets, Hank here gets trounced on like crazy. It’s extraoooordinary how quickly his body heals itself, or how (Apparently) easy it is for him to do stuff like ride his bicycle miiiiiles from place to place, all with broken ribs and such all. And good gosh, just prior to this continuation of the story, the dude had been zapped with a mechanical staple gun. At about this point, I’d directly address my query to author Ben H. Winters, and I’d suggest that in his NEXT book, he make Hank at least limp a bit, or gasp in pain whilst pedaling hither and yon. -Alas- I canNOT because, oh good golly gosh, I’m gonna have to weep here as there will be NO Next Book!
World of Trouble is of Hank desperately trying to find his sister, Nico, the only family he has left. She’d been part of a kinda sorta Super Secret cult that had big notions about saving the planet. Ever the worry wart, Hank feels he is right in that there shall be no such happenings, and she is wrong: The cult is just a waste of time, keeping her from accepting the imminent death of, well, EVERYone.
There are all sorts of shady characters in this, and good and faithful Houdini is ever by Hank’s side. The little dog, however, is all old and a trifle feeble (And Houdini at least hobbles and limps a lot… If a dog can do it, CERtainly Hank can after being trod upon by an Amish horse… just saying…). Old characters are a part of this story, but some have been retired. Instead, Hank is loose upon the blighted landscape, careening from city to city, each catalogued by color: You do NOT wanna be caught in a red city, but blue cities are rather safe enough. Communes and couples, the Amish plus a cult. New characters are chucked in, adding to my delight.
Oh gosh, how I LOVED Peter Berkrot’s narration. This audiobook/story has it all: Action sequences, stress and trauma, trust and mistrust, a gazillion (And six!) emotions and situations, and Berkrot fearlessly throws it all in, turning in a stellar performance. And boy did I EVER enjoy his accent and drawling style. I have a bit of a quirk when I listen to others speaking whereby I say, “Right?” to denote that I’m paying attention. And good cow! I found m’self drawling out, “Raaaaaht?” or dubbing the evening by calling it a, “Naaaaht”. That weird seedy New Orleans detective in a dime store police procedural. AWEsome and so much fun. I truuuly enjoyed his performance, and whenever I come across his narrations in audiobooks sales, dang I snatch them up, like, posthaste!
But now I’m to the “Lovely” part which is the tying up of loose ends as the story, the trilogy, comes to its ultimate, inescapable, end. Just flat-out wonderful, sooo heartwarming even as death and destruction and The Asteroid Apocalypse rushes forth. No way out, Winters started the inevitable conclusion from the get-go. It’s just that, honestly? I reeeally did NOT intend to like the characters so much, and that’s to go with the fact that I didn’t get anywhere close to figuring out the mystery within, which was a delight.
And? Oh heavens, I genuinely adored the ending, the final few sentences. Just LOVEly, enough that I rather kinda sorta discovered that I had a lump in my throat, and a tear (Or two) was threatening to trickle down a cheek. Simply beautifully done.
With that, I find m’self indeed addressing the author with a hearty: Well done, sir!
Bravo, Bravo, >sniffle< , Bravo…
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