The Condemned -- David Jack Bell

This was the last book I read before the fire, and I had written some comments on it that I never got to post. However, it's too good a novel not to at least mention it. It's a debut novel, but you'd never know that by the smooth, powerful prose that Bell uses to tell the story of Jett Dormer, who salvages abandoned cars from a closed-off city inhabited by mysterious creatures left behind when terrorists poisoned the water supply. Set in an unspecified but not too distant future, THE CONDEMNED is just the sort of book I like. It's fast-paced, had fine characterization and plenty of action, and is told in a lean, hardboiled style. Even though it's being promoted as a horror novel and comes from a publisher known for horror, Delirium Books, it strikes me as more of a science-fiction novel, and a mighty fine one, at that.