EXPATRIATES

As a global economic meltdown called the Crunch spreads, a new Islamic Indonesian superpower is taking over neighboring nations in Southeast Asia. Without American military protection, Australia is in big trouble.

Janelle works in a hardware store in central Florida, where she and her husband have armed themselves to the teeth to protect themselves from hoarders and home invaders. Her sibling Rhiannon, part of a missionary family in the Philippines, must flee that island country, dodging bullets in the process. The siblings' fates, and that of Chuck, a Texas oilman in Australia, are linked in a story that is long on details about guns, survival techniques and military capabilities and short on the suspense and even rooting interests that would make the book readable. Though suffused with Christian sentiment, the book frequently reads like one of the military manuals Chuck's friend Caleb downloads ("The main goal of the Indo raids was to bluff the Australian military into moving their field artillery and few remaining air assets to defend cities on the east and west coasts rather than on the north coast, where invasion was most likely"). 

Rawles' fourth in a series of contemporaneous novels about "the coming collapse" may leave some less than eager to read Book 5.