Possibly the best book I have read this year. Grand mix of apocalyptic end of world urban fantasy, myth, and gunplay. Shane Riordan liberates Georgie O'Halloran from an insane asylum and they embark on a road trip through warring US militias to reclaim Georgie's manuscript that has become a world-wide best seller under her old lover's name. It's great.

I received a review copy from the publisher. ( )

This was a genre-defying novel. Part dystopia, part fantasy, part quest story. It was an engaging title narrated by Shane Riordan who has lived again and again. He's under a curse to do so until he learns what he is supposed to learn.

Currently, he is best friends with Georgie O'Halloran who suffers from depression. They met when she was in college and his was a janitor at the college. They became friends. She was intrigued by Celtic myths, and he told her lots of stories never revealing that they were about his past. She wrote them up and illustrated them and gave them to her lover as a gift. The lover - Reginald Feely - took her gift, claimed it was his own work, and sold it for publication. It, and the video game it inspired, became a cult hit which incited some of the factionalism that is plaguing the United States.

Shane breaks Georgie out of the hospital where she is being treated and the two take off to find Feely and gain his apology for stealing her book and intellectual property. They need to travel from the East Coast to the West Coast through a disintegrating United States filled with gangs each touting their own version of what should be. And they are being pursued by people who don't want them to interfere with the book or the video game.

I enjoyed the story once I got over the writing style which at first seemed to be filled with sentence fragments. I enjoyed learning more about Shane and what his quest was. He is definitely the main character of this one despite what the blurb seems to imply. ( )