By Kate Thompson
Rating: 4 1/4 stars
This is the companion novel to excellent The New Policeman and The Last of the High Kings, featuring familiar characters from those stories. Set sometime in the future, devastating weather is sweeping the world, causing floods, droughts, hurricanes and worse, slowly eliminating land and food supplies and ultimately, all of the human race. In Ireland, the tyrannical local Commander heads up an army lead by his brother who forage amongst the people who are left, compelling them to come work for him or taking any supplies they can find. But that army general has a plan--he knows there exists the land of T'ir na n'Og where time passes so slowly as to almost not move at all, and if he can get the remaining people and relics of human culture through the time skin to that fairy land, he can save the human race. But as the first people appear in T'ir na n'Og, they run into the fairies, who soon discover that the man who is sending the folk across is none other than Donal, J.J. Liddy's son. J.J. has retired to T'ir na n'Og, but when he discovers that his youngest son Aidan has taken over as the greedy commander, he has to set out to try and stop him. Meanwhile, Donal continues trying to save everyone he can. Is the world finally at an end? Or can it still be saved? Fans of the previous books will find much to like here, and will wonder how things will turn out in this compelling tale. We all should hope there truly exists a T'ir na n'Og.
