My full The First Bird, Episode 1 audiobook review can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

This is a spin on a couple of old favorites of mine. Indiana Jones mixed with The Land of the Lost with a Chritonesc back drop that kept me interested and wanting to no more. A scientist makes an incredible discovery, races back to civilization to make the announcement to the world. Only to find that he has discovered an incredibly nasty virus. Now a team races against the clock to retrace the steps of the scientist to find a cure.

This being the first of three audio books I understood the need for character building, although I did find it almost excessive. To an extent that it almost interfered with the plot. Ending very abruptly, making me wonder why it was released as a series and not just one book. Maybe this is why they choose to call it episode 1 and not book 1.

I have high hopes for the next "episode" and will be listening to it very soon. I hope that many of the questions created here will be answered.

Audiobook provided for review by the publisher. ( )

The title indicates that it is Episode One - which I took to mean that it was the first part of a series... i.e. book one of, say, a 3 book series. This was not the case: this is more like an Episode 1 in terms of a storyline arc in a TV series... i.e. as if you were watching part one of a 3 part TV show where episode one sets up the problem, episode two explores how it can be resolved, and episode three resolves it.

In the latter example, you do expect a cliff-hanger at the end of each show, and you will tune in next time to find out what happens. This novella is exactly like that... the characters get to a certain point, in the middle of the plot, and the story just stops. It does not resolve any single component first, it just ends at the end of a scene.

This is why I have only given the novella 3 stars (yes, the word novella is accurate - it is too short for a novel, and if it were a short story, it would have had a resolution). The story is decent and suspenseful but... a written story ending in the middle of a plot point is just jarring. You are absolutely required to get the next book in the series if you want to know anything about how this story is resolved (and my guess is that you will need to buy the 3rd one as well).

If novella 2 of a series is MANDATORY in order to have any sense of resolution to a story, and each part is too short to be a proper novel in the first place, it should be packaged and sold along with novella one. Even Stephen King's The Green Mile books had a mini-resolution of a story between installments (if you read them before they were compiled into a single book)... even though it had a cliffhanger between parts.

Oh, and the price of it does not reflect the fact that it isn`t even a complete story. You will buy it thinking you got a proper book on the cheaper end of the scale, not 1/3 of a complete story which will end up costing about the same as an expensive hardback. ( )