I'm giving this 2.5 stars, though it only grabs that last half star because I thought the story had a lot of potential, which was very frustratingly not realized.

Let me start from the beginning. You've got Harry and Jack, two British army veterans heading over to New York for their yearly vacation when a wave of turbulence disrupts their journey. Communications go down and after a shaky landing our dynamic duo enter JFK to find utter carnage as waves people lay dead, their bodies butchered by whatever it seemed was in reach. Cue survival horror and all of the delicious conspiracy theories.

As a premise? No issues. Great even! A nice switch up from zombies and a good mystery to carry the plot when people aren't defending themselves to the death. Everything solid so far.

Unfortunately, the book just doesn't pull it off.

I'll start with the good. I liked how Twitter played such a part in communication initially because I felt that's exactly what would happen IRL. I liked the initial mystery, which was well introduced as the authors dropped crumbs among their pages, as well as the set up of the story and the scenes in JFK.

And that's about it tbh.

My first issue is with the characters. Jack at least has a bit of spunk to him with his fiery temper and obvious love of bar brawls. But everyone else is utterly bland. And even Jack's temper eventually fades into the background and you forget he had anything distinguishable about him from his brother by the end of the book.

And the other brother, Harry, who is the POV of our tale?

*facepalm*

Aside from being utterly boring (and in the middle of an apocalypse no less), he functions more as a some kind of omniscient narrator, instantly telling me every other characters ticks and thoughts a second after they've said or done anything. I never have to second guess what anyone might mean, or come to my own conclusions about the characters cause Harry is too busy telling me EXACTLY what they mean. Half the fun of books is getting to know the characters, I can't do that if the authors are shoving everything about them in my face. It reduces them to ink on a page as opposed to people I should care about, worry about in the midst of the disaster that is their reality.

Which is exactly what caused the next problem. All of the characters could have suddenly spontaneously combusted and I wouldn't even have blinked as I turned the page, cause I didn't care about any of them. Hell, I didn't even remember that the POV's name was Harry until about a third of the way through the book.

The "villains" of the tale as well just dumbfounded me. They were all two dimensional try hard evil doers. I wanted to reach out and pat them on the heads cause bless their cotton socks but they came across as evil as a Monday morning (which, admittedly, is pretty evil. Just not apocalypse evil). They talked the talk but I never believed they could walk the walk. Where were my villains that part of me agrees with? The ones that make a little bit of me secretly wish the heroes would fail? Or the ones that have my toes twisting every time they speak, for their cruelty and twisted minds disturb me, even as they stay locked within a book?

Nonexistent unfortunately.

Also, no spoilers, but what started out as an intriguing mystery kinda fizzles out into clichés by the end. I kept waiting for the authors to say "GOTCHA!" And whip something out but, as other reviewers have said, the ending comes out of nowhere and the book just abruptly finishes. It doesn't even deserve to be called an ending.

But the most aggravating part about this book is that there's still some part of you that wants to like it, in my case at least. It felt like this was story the authors really wanted to tell, and put a lot of effort into, but the writing just really let it down. I kept looking for reasons to enjoy it, but they had disappeared by the last twenty pages.

I'm not writing these authors off my list, but Im afraid won't be picking up the next in this series.