Who is Nora Roberts? This woman is amazing.

Certainly she was unsurprised at the beginning of the Covid pandemic.

After all, she’s just published her own pandemic trilogy:

Chronicles of “The One” Books

Year One	(2017)	Amazon.com
Of Blood and Bone	(2018)	Amazon.com
The Rise of Magicks	(2019)	Amazon.com

This pandemic starts in the Scottish Highlands. A pheasant the bird that infects patent zero.

About 80% of the world’s population dies quickly.

Unlike Covid, a high percentage of the survivors have some kinds of magical abilities.

This trilogy is an easy read. I’d call it Young Adult.

Plenty of romance, as expected of Nora Roberts.

Good vs Evil.

The One is a young woman trained for this epic battle. A child born to a special destiny. A teacher who had been waiting over 1000 years for her birth.

Fast paced. Easy to follow as Roberts does not make the typical mistake of including too many characters.

YES it’s predictable and sentimental.

Still, I enjoyed all 3 predictable and sentimental books. I wished there were more in the series.

Once again, I have to point out that Nora Roberts does not get the respect she deserves.

She publishes so frequently. And sells so many books, that very few bother writing reviews.

Divine Evil (2010) is another entertaining story, well told.

Not her best book of the 270+. But well worth reading.

Clare Kimball, an accomplished sculptor, is troubled by depression and the return of childhood nightmares. So she takes a break from New York City and heads for her sleepy hometown in Maryland, despite its association with her beloved father’s violent but apparently accidental death.

Cameron Rafferty, formerly the town hellion, is now the sheriff and faced with a puzzle: the century-old grave of an infant has been dug up. In fact, the grave was robbed by Satan worshipers; Clare’s dreams date from the night in her childhood when she saw them performing a coven ceremony–and they know she saw them.

Cam’s problems are compounded when the mutilated corpse of his hated stepfather is discovered in a field after the two have a public fistfight. …

Publishers Weekly

Excellent.

The 2023 book by Barclay is as terrific as the rest.

Jack Givins’ father was a killer for hire — whisked away by witness protection, leaving Jack and his mother to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives as best they could.

Years later, Jack is a grown man with problems of his own.

He’s a talented but struggling author, barely scraping by on the royalties from his moderately successful first book.

So when the U.S. Marshals approach him with a lucrative opportunity, he’s in no position to turn them down. They’re recruiting writers like Jack to create false histories for people in witness protection—people like Jack’s father.

The coincidence is astonishing to Jack at first, but he soon realizes this may be a chance to find his dad. Only there’s one problem—Jack’s father hasn’t made contact with his handlers recently, and they have no idea where he is. He could be in serious danger, and Jack may be the only one who can find him.

But how will he find a man he’s never truly known? A man who has done terrible things in his lifetime and made some deadly enemies in the process—enemies who wouldn’t think twice about using his own son against him.

Amazon

1. The Passage, 
2. The Twelve 
3. City of Mirrors

White heroic action guy transports and protects a girl who is somehow immune to the plague.

… Sound familiar? 😀

One season of a TV adaptation was made. Audience 85% on Rotten Tomatoes.

But critics didn’t like it. Not renewed.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Justin Cronin is a graduate of Harvard and former professor of English at Rice.

He’s competent.

But I don’t buy this bloated, confusing trilogy.

It should be 8-9 books in logical sequence rather than 3 massive volumes in seemingly random order.

It’s sometimes compared with King’s The Stand (1978) — but that’s being very generous. The Stand is much better.

Nora Roberts’ Year One is much better.

King said he liked the Passage series, however.

The Passage focuses on Project Noah, a secret medical facility where scientists are experimenting with a dangerous virus that could lead to the cure for all disease, but also carries the potential to wipe out the human race. 

… begins in 2016 and spans more than ninety years, as colonies of humans attempt to live in a world filled with superhuman creatures who are continually on the hunt for fresh blood. …

… two sections: the first and shorter section covers the origins of the virus and its outbreak, while the second is set 93 years after the infections, primarily following a colony of survivors living in California. …

I quite enjoyed the long book and was keen to press on.

Good characters. I was never lost.

---

It’s said the middle book of a trilogy is typically worst.

The Twelve is worse.

Four plot lines. Too many characters.

Too much confusing jumping forward and backward in time.

I didn’t like the characters and their stories nearly as much as in the first book.

The ending was probably the best part. It did tie up some of the many, many loose threads. Of course it made no sense. How does an explosion kill super beings and yet leave mere mortals alive?

---

The City of Mirrors (2016) is the final book in the trilogy.

The back story of patient zero, Tim Fanning, is pretty much a novella embedded in the 3rd book. It is interesting, however.

Ending of the trilogy?

Doesn’t make much sense to me.

This could have been 3 excellent books rather than a hodge hodge of 8.5 rambling books.