By: Nora Roberts
Synopsis:
From the book dust jacket:
It began on New Year’s Eve.
The sickness came on suddenly and spread quickly. The fear spread even faster. Within weeks, everything people counted on began to fail them. The electrical grid sputtered; law and government collapsed – and more than half of the world’s population was decimated.
Where there had been order, there was now chaos. And as the power of science and technology receded, magick rose up in its place. Some of it is good, like the witchcraft worked by Lana Bingham, practicing in the loft apartment she shares with her lover, Max. Some of it is unimaginably evil, and it can lurk anywhere, around a corner, in fetid tunnels beneath the river – or in the ones you know and love the most.
As word spreads that neither the immune nor the gifted are safe from the authorities who patrol the ravaged streets, and with nothing left to count on but each other, Lana and Max make their way out of a wrecked New York City. At the same time, other travelers are heading west, too, into a new frontier. Chuck, a tech genius trying to hack his way through a world gone offline. Arlys, a journalist who has lost her audience but uses pen and paper to record the truth. Fred, her young colleague, possessed of burgeoning abilities and an optimism that seems out of place in this bleak landscape. And Rachel and Jonah, a resourceful doctor and a paramedic who fend off despair with their determination to keep a young mother and three infants in their care alive.
In a world of survivors where every stranger encountered could be either a savage or a savior, none of them knows exactly where they are heading, or why. But a purpose awaits them that will shape their lies and the lives of all those who remain.
The end has come. The beginning comes next.
My Thoughts:
I enjoyed this book. It is the second Nora Roberts I have read, and I plan on reading the other two in the trilogy. I became invested in the characters pretty quickly, and want to find out what happened to them. I did, however, find the rapid spread of the virus to be a little unbelievable. I know with international travel being so easy now that disease will spread quickly, but billions dead in two weeks seemed a little too quick. But I can overlook such things if I’m enjoying a novel; I don’t expect them to be perfectly believable. I had more of a believability problem with how quickly Lana fell for Simon. It seemed she had barely grieved for Max, but maybe that’s how it is when you go through something intense together. I felt like that could have been drawn out and the relationship allowed more time to develop. Still, I am anxious to read the next book, and sincerely hope that we get to revisit New Hope and find out what happened to the other characters we came to know throughout the book.
What did you think of it?