Review of Terri Blackstock's TRUE LIGHT
Do you own a wind-powered generator capable of powering at least a few appliances and lights? Does your home have a rainwater collector? or your own protected well? or solar panels for heat? Do you maintain a garden in the spring and summer then preserve fruits, vegetables for winters to come? Are you proficient in animal husbandry and own some stock of both sexes? If your answer is yes, then you are among the fortunate to live on a farm—and you'd better consider a nice tall barbed wire electrified fence.
Do you ever stop and think about how dependent the modern world has become? Think about this: what is the one thing that separates the quality of our lives from the early centuries of human existence? Technological advances. We in the western world take much for granted, but what if our high-tech existense was brought to a screeching halt? Terri Blackstock has explored just this premise in her most recent series of novels: the Restoration Series.
The continuing story of suspense focuses on one community's reactions to a world-wide technological crisis of mammoth proportions. A supernova emitting electromagnetic pulses is responsible for the world's technology crash. Every aspect of life on the planet is affected by this and one of two things happen: either people band together to ensure their survival and become stronger in the process . . . or desperation manifests itself into greed, crime—evil. The "pulses" devastating effects in the small town of Crockett, Alabama mirrors stories from around the globe.
Blackstock uses the tech-crisis as background to an interesting yet simplistic suspense story. The male "lead" Mark Green is accused of attempted murder but the reader isn't absolutely positive if he is responsible until the people framing him make a couple of really bad errors. They pay two untrustworthy teens to place Mark at the scene of the crime and then enter the victim's hospital room, unplug life support while announcing ". . . tell them Mark Green stopped by." The female protagonist, Deni Branning may be more outgoing than the other women in the book but dang, you've got to love her for it!
Because it is the third book in the series, I wondered how Blackstock would deal with the back story. She starts her book in an manner reminiscent of Agatha Christie mysteries: an introduction of characters. Blackstock also uses the "Prologue" as a back story tool and manages to weave tidbits into conversation in a very realistic manner.
This suspense/ romance will be welcomed by Blackstock fans as they yearn to find out what happens next in the Pulses saga—and since the Pulses still have the world in crisis mode, I'd be willing to bet there will be at least a fourth installment to this series.
