

Ray, a former FBI ace agent, chose to live incognito as a low-level mechanic just to return to his family. On the eve of the zombie apocalypse, he is brutally betrayed by his manipulative, social-climbing wife and humiliated by a Wall Street elite who strips him of his fortune. With a cold sneer, Ray signs the papers and retreats with his adopted daughter into a subterranean, nuclear-grade fortified bunker—a stronghold that drained his entire life savings.

Morrison, a former top CIA operative, lives under an assumed name after suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, leading a quiet farming life in a small town with his daughter Vivian. The local criminal syndicate, the Rosetti family, covets his farmland. To force Morrison into submission, Theodore, the family's young heir, kidnaps the 17-year-old Vivian and tortures her to death brutally. Having lost his sole emotional anchor, Morrison casts aside his medication restraints entirely, unearths the stockpile of weapons he has hidden away for a decade, and storms the Rosetti manor alone to exact revenge. Senior figures within the city's police force, municipal government and the CIA are all well aware of Morrison's terrifying combat prowess from his past. They order an emergency city-wide evacuation and stand aside to let him wipe out the entire criminal family, kicking off a brutal vendetta of blood for blood. Revolving around paternal love, trauma, corrupt power networks and unbridled vengeance, the story interweaves the lingering shadows of past killings with the mutual despair and devastation of the present, unfolding an unstoppable bloody reckoning.

At the birthday party for my Mafia husband, Galvan, I touched one of his blood-stained cufflinks and suddenly gained the ability to read minds. I read Galvan's thoughts. He was thinking, "Tracy's body is so tempting. Much better than my cold wife." Tracy, his employee, was with her broke boyfriend, Reuben. Her thoughts dripped with contempt, "Reuben is useless. His gifts were cheap. Once I dump him, I’ll be with Galvan." Interestingly, Reuben, the supposedly worthless boyfriend, was actually thinking, "My father's test is almost done. How do I tell Tracy I'm the heir to the largest Mafia family?" Fascinating. Galvan, the man I stood by, appeared wealthy on the outside, but the true heir was treated poorly. I lifted my wine glass and elegantly approached the penniless Reuben.

Aurelius spent a thousand solitary years on an immortal assembly line, rolling pills in paradise. A cosmic traffic incident cuts that career short and drops him into the body of James Cross, a mistreated eldest son, pressured into a humble marriage, and apparently everyone's punching bag. What Aurelius finds instead is a wife and mother-in-law who offer nothing but patience and gentle care. For someone who has never once been loved, it undoes him completely. He can't repay them with money or status. So he does the only thing he knows how—he decides to take the whole family to immortality with him.