Beyond the Night
The Heroes of New Vegas Book 1
Colleen Gleason

SciFi Mystery Romance

Mystery, action, and romance. Elliot and his friends woke up in a cave they had been exploring to find 50 years had passed and the world as they knew it was gone. This is more SciFi than post-apocalyptic as significant time has passed since the upheaval. It’s not so much about survival as the mystery of what happened to the world and these men. We don’t get the answer in this first novel, just clues. But it’s not a cliffhanger. Subsequent novels in the series take up the mystery with other couples as the main characters.

The beginning drew me in with a sense of mystery, making me want to understand what was going on. It’s not an action start but a teaser start – a creepy feeling. We aren’t given a load of backstory at the beginning. The setting and action slowly revealed the state of the world. Great writing with quick pacing kept me reading. Little things like new slang words and names not matching the genders they are currently most often assigned to helped add realism to the future setting.

There were good action scenes, very good descriptions of the environment, good world building, and some humor to relieve the tension. The women are strong and don’t wait for the men to save them. I don’t want to give too much away, so suffice to say I adored Jade’s action during the climactic action scenes.

3rd close, past tense. Chapters from different characters, most from the mains, but a few from secondary characters. We also get some journal entries written by a secondary character at the beginning of the upheaval. I liked the glimpses of the beginning.

Occasional foul language. Significant violence. There are some graphic sex scenes. A lot of it is described with scatterings of verbs or adjectives in a poetic way.

No cheating, OW/OM drama, or nonconsent.  HFN

Error count: 11 – Pretty good. These were missing, extra, or misspelled words and missing punctuation marks. Commas are not routinely missing, so I marked where they were for a total of 38 missing commas. Head-hopping occurs in only one chapter.

Overall, I really liked this. I don’t see myself wanting to re-read it, so 4 stars. I am going to read the next in the series.