The epic last chapter in a trilogy full of excitement, adventure, and heartbreak.
The final installment in Bobbitt’s post-apocalyptic trilogy chronicles a surviving island town in the Florida Keys.
The half-century-long tenure of beloved Cedar Key mayor Hayes David has been bifurcated into two halves as different from one another as imaginable. In the first 26 years, Hayes was concerned with the typical innocuous civil matters of a small island town, as well as the more contentious vagaries of the once-booming clamming industry for which Cedar Key is known, including frequently violent conflicts with a disenfranchised family from the mainland, the Skipjacks. As those tensions were set to boil over, they quickly became moot on the morning when residents of the Key saw a blinding flash of light, followed by unending waves of the fatal “gray”—the ensuing radiation from the nuclear explosion that ended the world as residents knew it. In the second half of Hayes’ mayorship, he’s navigated the tragedies and treacheries of leading the survivors. Over the 25 years since the catastrophe, Hayes has shepherded the town through the heartbreak of loss, the dangers of survival, and the beginnings of a new world. The time has come for him to finally cede leadership to Luke Buck, and none too soon. Not long after readers reacclimate to the familiar territory of Bobbitt’s Cedar Key, a massive army arrives on the island’s closely guarded shores. The invaders assert their rights to the land, saying they’ve been sent by the new, rebuilt American government. The newcomers claim that these men require safe passage across the island, but the long-suffering survivors of Cedar Key know a trap when they see one. In an epic, frequently guerrilla-like battle across the Key, the old families who have remained stalwart throughout the trilogy take up arms to defend their homeland. Readers come to know and love Georgie, a Cedar Key native who, living in Virginia at the time, lost his family on the day of the blast. Searching for a place to heal his wounded heart, he returns to Cedar Key just in time to fight for its survival in a symbolic full-circle moment worthy of the foundations Bobbitt has established throughout these novels.
Fans of the series will no doubt rejoice at this latest and final entry in the trilogy. Bobbitt’s trademark gift for drawing unpretentious, down-home folks who carry sharp knives they’re willing to draw to defend their homes is on full display here. He also excels at depicting tender moments like Georgie’s long-awaited return, as seen by his old pal Thomas: “An onslaught of formative memories overwhelmed them both—the church songs sang with naked girls swimming in phosphate pits, the road trips in the cheap, unreliable cars of their youth…the whole lives they had lived together in the old world were all as real and present now as if they were appearing before them on the pier.” The author’s previous works featured no small amount of gun battles and dramatic, tragic deaths, and devoted readers will have to white-knuckle through the departures of long-loved characters. The devastation is of a piece with the strong emotional impact of the earlier novels, which are followed up beautifully in this novel as Bobbitt delivers a send-off worthy of a Cedar Key sunset.
The epic last chapter in a trilogy full of excitement, adventure, and heartbreak.Pub Date: May 23, 2026
ISBN: 9798994918838
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Aphroditois Books
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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