Lightning Fall

Bill Quick's novel Lightning Fall is out in Kindle format, on Amazon.  Buy it here: Lightning Fall: A Novel of Disaster. Bill says a dead tree edition will be available shortly.

The first half of my review is here: The Clue Meter: "Lightning Fall", A Review (Part I)
The second half, um, never got posted.

Insert embarrassed emoticon here.

So, the bit (in comments) where I said Lightning Fall isn't as "dark" as One Second After?  Yeah, after that it gets gritty and rather  dark.

A quick synopsis:

Lightning Fall tells the tale of the aftermath of an attack on the USA.  In the near-future, an enemy launches three nukes with the intention of having them detonate in orbit,creating a High-altitude Electro-Magnetic Pulse (HEMP) effect, which, as all connoisseurs of man-made disaster know, will have the effect of frying the Grid, and most of not all electronics.

The attack on the West Coast succeeds, and basically wipes out all services west of the Rockies. The attack on New Orleans fizzles (or does it?), and nukes the city.  "Oh, it fizzled, hooray!"  Well, no, because it closes the Mississippi. The attack on the East Coast is delayed just enough that the missile in intercepted.

Adventures ensue.The story follows characters in California, a news crew that is (at the point in the book I'm at) trying to get to California, Indiana, Louisiana, and Washington DC. 

So, the news crew makes it to San Fran, doesn't like what it sees, and finds some ham radio operator (whose name you'll recognize, see the Wiki article on Tuckerization) with a recording that kinda ruins things for the President, whom, by the way, you will ALL recognize despite names being changed to protect the innocent author from lawsuits.

I enjoyed it, a real "screen swiper", as it were -- do we need a new term for "page turner"?  I know enough about prepping and the science involved in this particular threat that it is all plausible, although, as I noted in my first review some may shriek "Deus Ex Machina" at things that seem implausible to them -- like a prepper in San Francisco. As I also noted in my first review, they can try and discuss Bill's lifestyle with him, although I suspect he will tell them to pound sand if they try.