HUNTING FOR THE LAMB OF GOD

A nuclear strike over America effectively throws much of the Northern Hemisphere back to the Stone Age in O’Donnell’s apocalyptic thriller.

On May 24, 2022, three nuclear warheads detonate in the thermosphere above the United States. Sent by Iran—and facilitated by North Korea—the super electromagnetic pulse immediately wreaks havoc. Satellites become disabled, airplanes fall from the sky, cars stop working, and cellphones become useless. In Centennial, a suburb of Denver, the family of Bill Jenkins—a statistician with the Department of Agriculture who’s working out of Washington, D.C.—is already preparing for the worst. Jenkins, a “prepper of sorts,” has an underground bunker filled with a year’s worth of food and water for his wife, Viv, and their two sons, Brian and Mark. As the world devolves into chaos, the Jenkinses share their supplies with their surviving neighbors, Julie Price and her kids, Jack, Rocky, and Kate. But when people start dying of starvation, the group faces nomadic cannibals hunting for human prey. As life becomes a hellscape, Jenkins—living in an elaborate subterranean government bunker while working to get the country back on its feet—learns of a top-secret underground railroad system that connects cities all over the continent, one of which is Denver. Jenkins eventually gets the green light to find his family and return with them to Washington—but what he discovers in Colorado is beyond his darkest nightmares. This relentlessly paced, action-packed, and character-driven novel from the author of Meth War (2021) may strike some readers as a fusion of William R. Forstchen’s One Second After and Stephen King’s The Stand with a powerful Christian perspective. The story can get heavy-handed, however, when it comes to religion. Criminals, for example, are “men and women living their lives without God,” some of whom may “embrace Satan.” But any proselytizing fits seamlessly into the narrative as the Jenkinses and Prices find strength and wisdom in their faith-based lives to move forward in their quest to survive.

A fast-paced, dystopian tale of a near-future nuclear disaster told from a Christian viewpoint.