THE FLIGHT TO BLUE RIVER

Following a pandemic, an Oregon college student crosses a mostly deserted (but dangerous) America in search of her ex-lover, the estranged son of a wealthy man.

Dean offers this second installment in his Thermals of Time trilogy of post-apocalyptic adventure/drama. The first, Scream of an Eagle (2020), centered on James Mendez, the college-age son of mega-billionaire Robert Mendez, an offstage but evidently disagreeable tycoon whose Allpro food monopoly controlled a dysfunctional America of the 2030s. Things went completely to pieces with the combination of a violent uprising by embedded White supremacists in the United States military and a horrific “V-1” virus that killed millions, but which seemed to leave proportionally twice as many women as men alive. While James was last shown bereft at a homestead at the end of the previous book, this sequel opens with Anna Duran, his childhood sweetheart of mixed Native American blood, whom he was forced to abandon by his elitist dad. She is at college in Oregon when the V-1 virus hits and quickly kills her live-in fiance and most of the rest of the populace. Apparently lucky enough to have immunity, Anna begins a trek throughout the American West in hopes of somehow reuniting with James, meeting other pockets of survivors along the way. Unfortunately, gangs of bad guys from the extreme right have also lived through the catastrophe and, under a “New Army of God” banner, plan their own slave-culture nation in imitation of the old Confederacy. Anna is captured and suffers grievously. Throughout this corpse-strewn landscape of Montana, Idaho, and Colorado, branches of a new “Modern Times Church” now sprout up with their distinctive symbol of three black crosses, representing the mysterious “Mystic Martin,” who supposedly prophesied all of this. But are they benevolent or another cabal of murderous racists? Dean’s intriguing, character-driven story is very much a middle chapter of the SF saga, with players and themes introduced that seem destined only to pay off in the next installment. The plain-talk narrative still moves along at a steady pace, and Anna provides readers with a sympathetic, resilient hero (one of several, it turns out) weighing options of how to continue in a world that is much changed and, potentially, has no future in it for humankind. By the cliffhanger ending, the stakes on everything have been raised.

An engaging, post-apocalyptic, collapse-of-everything narrative that emphasizes character relations more than action.