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Friday 2 November 2012

Book Review: Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) by Michael R Hicks

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Bitter Harvest, book 2 in the Harvest trilogy by Michael R Hicks with Book 3 scheduled for publication in 2013.

It took me a while to get in to Season of the Harvest, book 1 in the Trilogy, back in 2011. But once in, I found a fast moving, modern, scary crime thriller, with the added zest of a bit of science fiction thrown in to mix things up.

Summary The Harvest books are dealing with a deadly and intelligent insectoid like creature who are able to take over a human body and perfectly mimic the person taken over! It is not known where these creatures originated from, whether they have been lying dormant on earth for millennia or whether they have come from space. What is known is that they can be killed but normally only after they have wiped out 98% of those trying to kill them and as is the way in these situations, some escape..... In book 1 the Harvesters, as we have come to call them, could not reproduce and were working on a way to genetically modify crop seeds that once planted and turned into food for the human population would rewrite the DNA of humans turning them into Harvesters.  Jack Dawson and Naomi Perrault and the rest of the EDF along with the US Govt. who finally came to believe in the threat, thought they had solved that problem ........

Bitter Harvest, as one would expect, takes up where the first book left off with out heroes who were declared terrorists by the US Government having been giving their own Agency to track down the missing bag of  genetically modified bag of grain seed.  It has been a year now and they still haven't managed it.  The new administration and President, still have difficulty in believing all that they have been told and in how catastrophic the Harvesters would be to the human race, if allowed a foothold on the planet, and decide to close down the new Agency, terminating all of its employees almost with immediate effect!

As any good writer will do, Hicks uses this to good effect to reintroduce the missing bag of seed with horrifying consequences. Without giving to much away, as is always difficult when writing a review.  The bag has fallen into the hands of a disenfranchised scientist who without knowing the deadly secret potential for devastation that it holds; all he and others in that field  know, is that the company who produced the seed were trying to introduce a seed that would improve the worlds food supply, and that the seeds produced for that purpose would be worth millions to be sold off to competitors!

And then planet earth starts to burn: India, China, Russia, Brasil, France and then back to the USA and  then you are (if an e reader) holding your finger or thumb over the button desperate to turn each page as you can't believe what is happening as we jump from continent to continent to raging battle after battle and only those few who have dealt with them before and who fully know how to try and kill them having that information sequestrated by their own government, does the full horror of what is happening and just what the original Harvesters did to the seeds unfold.  The story unfolds and Hicks has written it in a way where you just have to keep turning pages.  People whom we met in the first book, we meet again, they are hero's, but Hicks just as easily kills these people off just as the Harvesters are killing the general population while the governments of the world close in on themselves in the usual indecisiveness that seems to affect them in reality, and you find yourself wishing that maybe a Harvester or two should be let loose upon them......

The Harvesters couldn't reproduce in Season of the Harvest, and were still a terrifying and deadly problem for mankind; You may not want to know what they do in Bitter Harvest, but will you be able to resist peeking,  and, can mankind survive? And then that bugger again leaves us on the edge of planetary destruction and says wait and see in 2013, Oh how I sometimes hate authors ;-)

catch up with Mr Hicks at: @MR_Hicks_Fans

Editing for Kindle:  Good
Reading Enjoyment: 5 out of 5
Plot: 5 out of 5
Overall Rating: 5 out of 5
Chapters: 35 plus an epilogue
Page length: circa 394 NO PAGE NUMBERS I really do wish you guys and Amazon would get your acts togther.



2 comments:

  1. Oh wow! Sounds incredible. Jaye will love this series!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jules they are great books and so to is his In Her Name Series, can't recommend him enough but I do occasionally have to give I'm a slap but it is with love xx

    ReplyDelete

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