Cutter just wants to be left alone… until he doesn’t. Two mysterious women offer him a good wage (and the promise of intimate companionship) to aim his gun-slinging skills at their next task: returning peace to a war-torn, post-apocalyptic world split between those who survived the nuclear blast, and those who mutated into Enders.
The story launches right into the action, with a Wild West-style barroom brawl that sets the stage for a story full of gunplay, ramshackle saloons, and dried up towns full of untrusting and untrustworthy characters. Cutter initially has no inclination to leave his familiar watering hole, but the two women that came looking for him have a way of changing his mind.
Hannah is a blonde bombshell with a centerfold’s body, a sharp intellect, and an assassin’s grace. She’s the more extroverted of the pair, while Gehn masks certain aspects of her true nature beneath a layer of shyness. Gehn is an Ender, and her mutant / monster qualities are revealed subtly at first. As the story unfolds, we learn a lot more about these girls and what they’re capable of.
The writing in Endworld is solid and the editing is clean. It’s a fun, western-meets-post-apocalyptic tale of overlapping rival factions and setting old wrongs right. The narration is a little long on backstory from time to time, telling the reader about how the world as we knew it devolved into its present state. While the world-building is interesting, these intermittent history lessons are a minor drag on the story’s pacing.
The bad guys are universally heartless and self-serving, which is credible enough for a handful of shrewd killers happy to take a resource-deprived wasteland and capitalize on whatever opportunities they can find amidst everyone else’s suffering. They stand at the helm of a brewing war that Cutter and his allies can’t likely avoid.
Cutter carries a few old associates and rivals into the mix, a loyal pet canine, and a growing cadre of alluring women with insatiable appetites. Be warned: guns, knives, and thugs lurk behind every turned page, and no one in the story is immune from violence and gore.
There are also a handful of explicit sex scenes which help bring the characters closer together. The first such scene erupts seemingly out of nowhere, but things shape up more naturally after that.
All told, Endworld’s beginning makes for an entertaining series starter with the promise of more women, more bullets, and more political intrigue as the war ahead takes shape.