Avaritia

Avaritia is the first book in the Chloros Series. It is also I believe the first book author and fellow Texan, Rafael Guerra who also shares author space with Joe McKinney.

Anyone who has read a lot of self-published books by new authors can tell you it’s full of a lot more misses than hits. The stories fall apart fast, authors rarely invest in third party editor and the writing can be stagnate.

Most of that didn’t happen with Avaritia and I think we have a successful debut by a promising author here.

This is more merging of two books than one. The books takes place over two time periods and both progress forward in time until the story lines have connected.

One of the story lines is the background to what led to everything falling apart in the world. The story deals with genetically modified food and how it ended up on everyone’s plate. It was a well thought out and fleshed out story line. It made sense and read much like a medical thriller. However, as well as it was done I also found it to be the weakest part of the book. The reason being is that I felt like far too much time was spent on it. Since we were reading a Zombie book, we knew that the back story with modified food would lead to the zombie apocalypse so it didn’t really offer up that much suspense. Honestly I think this part of the story should have been whittled down to a dozen pages at the most.

The other story line deals with the post Apocalypse aspect of the novel. A man catches onto a group of survivors who have carved out a life living in an old sports stadium. Zombies still very much exist and the possibility of a cure is now real.

Avaritia is a good book and I feel like the series holds a lot of potential. The only weak area is what I mentioned above with the back story, as well written and creative as it was, by its nature it didn’t hold any suspense.

Characters are always more important to me than the actually story itself, and they were well fleshed out here. A story like this has a high tendency to have the over the top villain, thankfully that was avoided.

Rafael Guerra has created an interesting concept for a series and I am looking forward to book two in the series.

Grade: 

Avaritia can be purchased here