Lookit me reading and reviewing like a regular reader-person. The world’s gone crazy! Crazy, I say! Now if you’ll just let me slip out of this special white jacket that ties in the back, we’ll get on with the review.

Extinction Age is the third in the five-book Extinction Cycle series by Nicholas Sansbury Smith, and while I was eager to get into the story, I did enter with some trepidation. This book is the ‘meat’ in the sandwich of the series, and I’ve often found that this is the book where that tends to suffer from middle-book-wandering, but this is definitely not the case with Extinction Age.

Now before we go any further…

SPOILERY-SPOILERS MAY OCCUR PAST THIS POINT. READ ON AT YOUR OWN PERIL. SERIOUSLY. DON’T MAKE ME TELL YOU TWICE.

Extinction Age begins at a cracking pace, and also in the underground sewers of New York. Master Sergeant Reed Beckham and his rag-tag group of Delta Ghost and Marines are fleeing a horde of Variants, unaware they’re actually in the monsters’ lair… and their meat locker.

When you put monsters and soldiers in a claustrophobic environment, then add in a human food store, and that damn clickety-clack the Variants make (think that god-awful sound from Day of the Triffods), you’re in for some full-action, high-tension scenes, and you just know someone’s going to bite it.

Humanity isn’t doing so well either – with major, supposedly impenetrable political installations falling to the Variants, panic is starting to set it, and those in power are making some pretty shitty self-centred decisions, some even clamouring for power.

And running through this is always the science. It really is a race against time, and it’s a race humankind isn’t winning. Sometimes, humanity is its own worst enemy. Smith plays on this theme quite well, and often leaves you wondering who the real monsters are in this story.

The writing is tight, and the peaks and troughs throughout the story take you on quite the rollercoaster ride, and just when you think things couldn’t get any worse? Well… it’s never going to be an easy ride. While doctors Lovato and Ellis have created a new weapon, in doing so, Lovato unintentionally puts Beckham in harm’s way, but as that seems to be his comfort zone… still makes for tense-ridden moments.

But the ending? Oh, you will not see that coming. Many didn’t. J But it was a cracker of a way to end book three in the series.

This is my favourite of the Extinction Cycle Series thus far. So that thing I said earlier about ‘middle-book-wandering’? Yeah, doesn’t apply here.

On a Goodreads scale, it’s a solid 5.