World of Trouble

World of Trouble by Ben H. Winters
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With six days until a six mile-wide asteroid crashes into the earth, can Henry Palace navigate America's dying carcass and track down his sister?

I won this in a Booklikes Giveaway. Apparently their giveaways are easier to win.

Here we are, the conclusion of the saga Ben H. Winters began in The Last Policeman. Like the conclusion of every other saga, it had a lot of expectations to meet. Did it?

Yes. Yes, it did. World of Trouble picks up months after Countdown City left off, with a world on the brink of an asteroid impact. Hank Palace leaves the sanctuary of the cop commune behind to find his sister Nico. His quest sees him crossing paths with survivalists, the Amish, and the remnants of the group Nico joined, dedicated to staving off Armageddon on a planet-wide scale.

If there is a theme to the Last Policeman saga, it's "To Thine Own Self Be True." Despite every obstacle thrown in his path over the last three books, Henry Palace keeps on keepin' on, doing what he was born to do despite the futility of it all. In The Last Policeman, he tries to prove a suicide was actually murder, despite everyone else not giving a shit. In Countdown City, he tracks down a man who may or may not want to be found. In this book, the final one in the trilogy, he wants to see his sister one last time.

World of Trouble has even more of a desperate feeling than the other two books in the series, not surprising since the world has less than a week left. Just as in the previous two books, Palace proves that he's like a dog with a prized bone, not willing to let go, once he's on the trail of something.

The ending wasn't all beer and bacon cheese burgers, either. I have to admit, Ben Winters could have taken the chicken shit way out, waved his wand, and given us all a different ending than what he presented. For my money, the ending he gave us was the only one that made sense in the context of the series.

World of Trouble was a satisfying end to a really good series. Four out of five stars.

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