"The war was over. And everyone lost."
The Last Exodus starts with this damning statement, setting an initially bleak tone for the first novel in journalist Paul Tassi's post-apocalyptic space trilogy.
Lucas has survived the Xalan invasion that destroyed Earth. The aliens retreated from Earth's nuclear retaliation, but the damage was done. Lucas wanders across the wastelands of the United States, to reach Portland, Ore., where his wife and son lived. After barely escaping a pretty woman's trap to steal his supplies and kill him, he arrives only to find the city a crater. His last hope gone, Lucas slumps to the ground in defeat, at the bottom of the inner basin.
Following a blue light into the crater wall through a series of caverns, Lucas finds a crash-landed yet still functional alien spacecraft, and a Xalan survivor--a rare case since the war--a highly intelligent scientist from an important family on the alien world.
Along with Asha, the woman who ambushed him, a baby boy rescued from a community with a taste for human flesh, and Alpha, the alien, Lucas learns to survive anew as the group fights its way past the cannibals, various automated space defense systems left over from the war and, finally, a Xalan general, genetically altered into a deadly creature with incredible powers and intelligence.
All of this leads them to a new planet, where Lucas and Asha become ambassadors to a galaxy full of beings engaged in a centuries-old war, bent on destroying each other. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor