A good narrator can make a bad book good and a bad narrator can ruin a good story. I once listened to Sissy Spacek ruin To Kill a Mockingbird and thought I’d never hear a worse narration. This one is worse. Having said that, the story itself, more specifically the first book disappointed me because there is no ending. None. It just stops and Book Two picks up right where One ended. I read/listen to a lot of these end of society books, probably more than I should and in all of them, you recognize patterns. Those common patterns are in this author’s work just like all the others. This one wasn’t nearly as bad as some. I thought the premise of the story, terrorist blow up all the refineries with a single mortar shot to each with the result that Uncle Sam immediately halts all fuel sales was silly. First off, I don’t think a single mortar into a refinery’s tank farm would have a cascade effect putting the entire refinery out of business. I used to work in one. A plant that boils gasoline every day has pretty robust firefighting capabilities. Second, even if you did kill all the tank farms at the refineries, there are still millions of barrels of gas in the pipelines and in other storage facilities. They’re practically everywhere. The knee jerk reaction of the government to immediately stop fuel sales and thereby stranding millions of people all over the country didn’t make a lot of logical sense to me. But, writer’s prerogative and without that bit of detail, there’s no novel. The other thing that rubbed me the wrong way was the character of Jim. He’s a state employee of the mental health service but he’s a hard core prepper with more guns and bullets than a Schwartzeneger movie. And so does his pal coworker. It seemed out of place. He also has a farm he bought, 50 acres I think it said, with outbuildings, heavy equipment and water. All that on a state salary? I need to work there. True to form in almost all the books in this genre, when the balloon goes up, immediately society turns into a dog eat dog world. I don’t see that. Not like the week of. Give it a month then let’s see what society does with that. A few days? I don’t think so. Haven’t decided yet if I’m going to continue the series. If it was a different narrator, I would. But it isn’t so…