British MI6 agent Jake Tate is on holiday in Maine, USA when a terrorist attack on a massive scale takes place. An Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) had been detonated which destroys anything that is controlled by electronics. Being the world we live in today that is a hell of a lot of things and rendering the country to its knees.

With the country in a panic, key figures being assassinated, and violence escalating Jake’s skills are called upon as he is the only person on the ground in the US that has the knowhow to stop this attack turning into a war.

Total Blackout is an exciting, explosive thriller that had me on the edge of my seat more than once. The book moves between the bad guys and Jake and we also get to see into Jake’s past. The book opens with the blackout and then moves back in time two days.

Whilst I was gripped to the pages I was also a little disappointed that by 35% of the way through the book we still weren’t back where we started with the blackout and that apart from Jake’s few suspicions of the Russian’s staying at the same motel as him, being stopped by the police, and some assassination attacks nothing more had occurred. I was expecting this to be a full-on adventure the whole way through.

This is a tense thriller that is very modern and shows how much we actually rely on technology these days. I loved Jake’s character and the way he thought about things and acted. He had an air of James Bond to him, just not as posh!

This book is exhilarating, frightening, and far too realistic for my liking 🙂 I now can’t wait to see what is install for Jake in the future.

ALEX SHAW B.A.(Hons), P.G.C.E. spent the second half of the 1990s in Kyiv, Ukraine, teaching Drama and running his own business consultancy before being head-hunted for a division of Siemens. The next few years saw him doing business for the company across the former USSR, the Middle East, and Africa.

Alex is an active member of the ITW (The International Thriller Writers organisation) and the CWA (the Crime Writers Association). He is the author of the #1 International Kindle Bestselling ‘Aidan Snow SAS thrillers’ COLD BLOOD, COLD BLACK, COLD EAST, DELTA FORCE VAMPIRE and the forthcoming JACK TATE thriller series. His writing has also been published in the thriller anthologies DEATH TOLL, DEATH TOLL 2, DEATH TOLL 3, CAPITAL CRIMES and ACTION PULSE POUNDING TALES 2 alongside International Bestselling authors Stephen Leather and Matt Hilton.

Alex, his wife and their two sons divide their time between homes in Kyiv, Ukraine, Worthing, England and Doha, Qatar.

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