_Feral Agent_: by Ginger Booth. 5 stars.
I like where this series is going. Dee Baker, the heroine of the early books, is a compelling character but she is part of the leadership—is even considered Raj Royalty—and is married to one of the top commanders in the newly formed nation of Hudson, constructed out of the old states of New York and New England, minus Maine, which has been sucked up by Canada. The new protagonist, Ava Panic, is a 90-pound gang rat from New York, who washed out of West Point after surviving both the “Starve” and the Ebola Epidemic, both contrived to cull the population. She’s now been recruited to join a shadowy group of agents that some call the “Death Angels,” who do the dirty work outside of Hudson that needs to be done for the defense of the new nation and that serve a number of other, possibly morally ambiguous, goals.
Climate change and the disintegration of the United States has made life pretty tough for those who have survived. It is better for those fortunate enough to live where some semblance of government has survived. It is much more difficult in those areas where militias rule (our and Ava’s encounter with the patriarchal militia of opioid use where women are expected to know their place is more than a bit frightening) or where the leaders rule for their own profit. Ava and her former boyfriend, Frosty, travel undercover into a war zone, do some “Death Angel” business, survive a firefight, rescue a Colonel from prison, and drive out of Virginia over the climate-swollen bay on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge that’s no longer maintained and that’s always flooded except at low tide, while the armed forces of Virginia, including drones, scour all possible escape routes.
It’s a gritty story with more to come, but it convincingly portrays our possible future if the ravages of climate change are not reversed while introducing us to a new and plucky heroine, Ava Panic, who is finding her way is a world turned upside down.