#Review of Countdown City (Last Policeman #2) by @BenHWinters #Published @QuirkBooks

There are just 74 days to go before a deadly asteroid collides with Earth, and Detective Hank Palace is out of a job. With the Concord police force operating under the auspices of the U.S. Justice Department, Hank's days of solving crimes are over...until a woman from his past begs for help finding her missing husband.

Brett Cavatone disappeared without a trace—an easy feat in a world with no phones, no cars, and no way to tell whether someone’s gone “bucket list” or just gone. With society falling to shambles, Hank pieces together what few clues he can, on a search that leads him from a college-campus-turned-anarchist-encampment to a crumbling coastal landscape where anti-immigrant militia fend off “impact zone” refugees.

The second novel in the critically acclaimed Last Policeman trilogy,Countdown City presents a fascinating mystery set on brink of an apocalypse--and once again, Hank Palace confronts questions way beyond "whodunit." What do we as human beings owe to one another? And what does it mean to be civilized when civilization is collapsing all around you?

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Biography

Ben H. Winters is the author of seven novels, including Countdown City, a nominee for the Philip K. Dick Award, and The Last Policeman, which won an Edgar Award, was nominated for the Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel, and was an Amazon.com Best Book of 2012. His other books include Bedbugs, Android Karenina, the New York Times bestseller Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and the middle-grade novels The Mystery of the Everything and The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman, a Bank Street Best Book of 2011 and an Edgar Award nominee. Ben is also the author of many plays and musicals for children and adults, and he has written for national and local publications including the Chicago Tribune, Slate, and the Huffington Post. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he teaches at Butler Univsity, and he blogs at www.BenHWinters.com 

So this book two picks up with only 77 days left before we all bit the big one.  I think by this time if I hadn't gone nuts. I would be crying and prob. loosing it.  I really think that if this was going to really happen. And there wasn't anyway to stop it.  I would wish that 1. The Government wouldn't tell us.  I don't want to know. 2. I would really hope that myself and my family would all be asleep when it came. 3. That we all died with little to no pain......Ok ya NO PAIN!

So I really liked that it seemed that the author took everyones advice and had people call Hank on his crap.  In this one Hank is looking for a missing husband.  Which is still kinda out there since the world is ending is around 3 months.  But, hey I think if I had ties to someone that could help. I would want to know where my husband was.  So I guess it really wasn't to far out there lol.  So I am happy to say that in this one Hank figures out that his head is in a dark hole and starts facing reality.  Which was great and made the book so much better.  I really can't wait how the author is going to tie up all the ends in this wonderful thrilling end of the world series. July get here faster!

"All opinions are 100% honest and my own."

The Last Policeman is set in a world in which a massive asteroid is hurtling toward Earth, but the novel centers on one detective's murder investigation. Where did you get the idea to combine these two disparate elements of storytelling?

Well, you know, story ideas are like giant planet-dooming asteroids: they always take you by surprise. But I've always had a soft spot for certain kinds of science fiction, books that imagine one grand change to the human situation and tease it out. P. D. James's Children of Men is a marvelous example, or Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series. 

The "pre-apocalyptic" side of this "pre-apocalyptic murder mystery" definitely came first. I thought it would be fascinating to imagine my way into the sad and terrifying last months of civilization. Then I set about imagining the right hero for this kind of book, and I thought that what I needed was someone who is extremely dedicated to his work, who cannot let the world end before solving the puzzle before him. That's where the character of Detective Henry Palace came from, my intensely, even bizarrely dedicated public servant.

The obligatory question: What would you do if Earth would be annihilated in six months?

Well, I'm under contract with Quirk Books to write the sequel to The Last Policeman, so first I'd get that done. 

Just kidding. I think, honestly, that I would spend time with my children. I'd read them a lot of books, and take them to beautiful places, and try to prevent them from hearing anything about what was coming. (The idea of that, by the way, makes me tearful, as it did periodically over the course of writing this.) 

Can you give us any details about the upcoming second and third novels in the series?

Like The Last Policeman, each of the sequels will have at its center a crime that Palace is trying to solve. But, also like this one, each will be at least equally interested in the details of the disintegrating world, and in plumbing the psyche of this lawman: how and why he remains "on the job" even as the job, along with the rest of civilization, crumbles around him.

Disclaimer: Thanks to Goodreads and Amazon for the book cover, about the book, and author information.

Posted in: 4 Stars, Adult, Interview, Quirk Books, Review