(I received a free copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.)

In a nation still recovering from the nuclear tragedies of forty years earlier, Clyde is working a dead-end guaranteed job at a diner, and Moonis is incarcerated in a Labor Camp for the Malcontented. But when Moonis’s sister, Cecily, goes missing, the old friends escape their prisons to search for her in post-fallout America.
Moonis and Clyde follow Cecily’s trail until it leads them into the atomic-ravaged heart of the Midwest, an outlaw territory of dark legends and darker truths where Cecily is being held captive by a brutal gang lord.
But along with menace and death, this poisoned wasteland contains the possibility of a freedom beyond imagination—if only Moonis and Clyde, and the misfits who join their quest, can find the heroism to grab hold of it.

What great fun. I have read a number of the Victor Carl novels and enjoyed them immensely, but this is something completely different.

A nuclear incident forty years ago has left great chunks of the USA as a nuclear wasteland. Moonis is incarcerated when his sister gets kidnapped. He breaks out and begins his search. He teams up with Clyde, a prisoner of his "guaranteed" job at a diner, and together, with a lot of action and adventure through post-apocalyptic America, they set about tracking down the bad guys...

What I loved about this, apart from the new genre for the author, were the characters of Clyde and Moonis. Both were really well drawn and I was drawn to them both for different reasons. Along with the merry band of hangers-on, these two were the absolute highlight of this story.

I am not someone to make comparisons with other authors or books, but I feel quite comfortable saying that if Joe Lansdale had been invited to write a part of The Stand with Stephen King, this is kinda where it would have ended up!

Well worth the read and a nice distraction from the Victor Carl novels that I like so much.


Paul
ARH