The second book of The Blackout Series picks up where “36 Hours” left off, with the world having been plunged into darkness by a solar flare. The first novel did a fantastic job of building suspense and endearing you to the normal (if affluent) American family that have to suddenly become doomsday preppers. Here in this second novel, their prepping has paid off a little too well: The HOA of their neighborhood finds out about their supplies and threatens to loot them to share the goods. Colton, Madison and Alex do a good job of thwarting their antagonists, and even get on the good side of the HOA, which seems to have become the de facto government of their suburban Nashville neighborhood. Things get a little weird toward the end, though, when the neighborhood has to fight off a looters coming from Nashville proper.
It’s hard to review either of these novels, though, without saying a word about the author’s constant injection of his conservative political beliefs, which seem to be rooted in the suffocating conservatism of the 1950s. While Akart certainly has plausible deniability by writing in an intimate 3rd person POV, it’s not hard to guess where Akart falls on the political spectrum: He loves the military (the government) but hates FEMA (also the government). During “36 Hours”, I found this aspect of the story amusing; after all, there are plenty of conservative families in the affluent areas of Nashville. But as the story continues in “Zero Hour”, this kind of politicking becomes tiresome.
To Akart’s credit, though, he was able to craft three solid characters that I cared about. And he created a scenario that is unbelievably frightening. The suspense was good in this novel, but not as good as its predecessor. Hopefully Book 3 will return to the pacing that he did so well in Book 1.