Ant Middleton is best known for his role on S.A.S: Who Dares Wins where members of the general public are put through a gruelling set of S.A.S training lessons in a bid to see if they would be tough enough to make it right through to the end of the course, but he is also a man who has served this country not just in the Paras but also in the Special Boat Squad, an elite group of soldiers who quite literally are the best of the best.
Much of Ant’s time in the Special Boat Squad is still classified top secret, so anyone expecting to learn anything from those times is going to be sadly disappointed, but this is more about how he got to the point of where he is today, along with several life lessons he has learnt during his time in the armed forces that helped ground him and shape him into the man he is today.
It’s a highly enjoyable read, full of very helpful advice and coping strategies at the end of each chapter, and I can’t recommend this enough - 4 stars.
Lone Survivor is the first in a new series by Nikki Landis and is what can only be described as a horror novel mixed with a heavy touch of romance, and as such is something of a very mixed bag.
Bailee is the last woman on earth, or so she thinks, and has learnt to adapt and survive in a world currently overrun by the undead for the last year on her own, but then she discovers she is no longer alone...
There are other survivors out there, attempting to rebuild some kind of society, and she might just be the key to it all...
I was given a copy of this as an Arc, an advanced readers copy, in exchange for an honest review and as such, really wanted to enjoy this but unfortunately it just wasn’t for me.
It was enjoyable enough for what it was, but for me it lacked any depth or originality to the point where I kept thinking I’d read this before somewhere because so much of the story seemed familiar.
The Zombie genre nowadays is quite literally flooded, the market arguably overly saturated, and so to stand out in this day and age you really need to try and bring something new to the table and this is where I think this book ultimately fails. In my own recent release, a collection of Zombie shorts entitled Fear of the Dead, I tried to do something different by telling each story from a perspective you might not have heard from before, but
with Nikki Landis’ book it just feels a little like there is nothing much here that long-time horror fans won’t have seen before.
The cause of the outbreak too, for me personally, felt overly more complicated than it needed to be and the title of the book, Lone Survivor, is something of a misnomer as the lead character is only alone for just a few short chapters before suddenly she is thrust into the midst of a new community, fighting hard to restore some kind of order. I would have liked them, personally, to have turned up a little later in the book as I think some of the strongest chapters come early on in the book when Bailee is still alone, but that’s just me.
I really, really wanted to enjoy this, like I say, and I only wish I could be a little bit more positive about it, but the lack of originality and the constant feeling that I’d read all this before somewhere - or at the very least, seen the same situation play out before in too many other books before this - for me, meant the whole thing kind of just left me a little bored.
If you’re fairly new to the genre, or a big fan of Nikki Landis’ writing, then this is probably for you but if, like me, you’ve been around the block a few times, chances are you too will have seen everything here all done before and for that reason alone, I’m afraid I can only give this 2 stars out of 5.
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