LATEST REVIEW –  BY COLUMNIST PHIL ERWIN

Last Call – America tells of a time in the not-distant future when America finally has lost its way, and Freedom is just an echo of a memory. The Government has conspired to make its citizens “beggars in our own country,” gradually but inexorably taking over lands, stores, supplies, and means of protection, until the citizenry are nothing more than slaves to a distant Master.

Last Call – America tells of a new civil conflict, with the legacy Federal government clinging to D.C. and points south, while the rest of the country struggles to find its way back to Liberty.

It is the story of Rebecca Sanders, who abandoned a university career to care for her aging father in Massachusetts. “Beck” discovers her mother is a very different sort of monster than the one she has hated all her life, as she is drawn inexorably into the deadliest conflict to ravage the American landscape since Blue fought Gray. And Rebecca harbors her own secrets, as she morphs from naïve caregiver to hardened resistance fighter.

Jason Poole – A natural leader and instinctive fighter, whose decisive exterior as the head of the resistance masks a deep-seated disbelief in his own value as a man. Poole molts from Government soldier to freedom fighter almost effortlessly, yet struggles “to find reason in a world that no longer makes sense.”Poole, who broods about the horrors unleashed by the Enola Gay, knowingly accepts “collateral damage,” yet later admits, “I feel like we all died with them.”

David Hernandez, a Sergeant who spends countless brooding hours listening to the ghosts of his Native American ancestors before fighting to liberate the very country that had once subdued his own forbears.

Lois Bradley, a New England housewife whose young son is a first civilian casualty of the new civil war, and who survives a year as a Federal sex slave to become one of the hardest, deadliest of all the underground fighters, possessing secrets that could lead to final victory over the hated Federal government.

Commander Poole sets off a new civil war with the words: “God gave us our lives and this country. It’s time we get them back.” The story will range from a huge underground facility called Icecap beneath the snows of Vermont, to the warm breezes and bluebonnet-blanketed hills of Texas, to a war-ravaged, ruined Washington, D.C., where a dictatorial Federal government diabolically deploys civilians at every strategic target as human shields against Charon, the newest form of weaponry – an EMP generator that takes out people as easily as electronics.

Last Call – America is a bit of history, a bit of science, and a lot of heart wrapped into a fast-paced account of a fictional American future that may very well be much closer than we might want to believe.