Ben Winters continues the series he started in The Last
Policeman (see earlier entry) with Countdown City. In this book we are 3 months closer to the effective
end of the world by asteroid and things are deteriorating even more. Former police detective Hank Palace has been
asked to find a missing person, his former babysitter’s husband. He is driven (clearly as a coping mechanism)
to find an answer to the mystery and he does succeed in doing so. The attraction of the book continues to be
its dire setting and its depiction of society breaking down in the face of
certain doom. The setting is very
depressing, I was actually moved to tears (very rare for me) but it somehow remains
compelling.