The job of wildlife ranger Ben is to protect the last bear on earth, but Arnott Harbron has his sights set on killing the bear before leaving the planet. A clash of wills is inevitable in Bradley Somer's Extinction, a stupendously written survivalist adventure. Earth's climate is nearly unlivable. Anyone who can afford the ticket to the Copernicus lunar colony has already left or will be blasting off soon. But not Ben. He works for the Ursa Project, an underfunded effort to keep The Boss, the last bear on the planet, alive. Ben lives in the wild and monitors The Boss via a microchip implant. It's brutally cold in this mostly uninhabited landscape, so he's extremely surprised and suspicious to find heavily armed Arnott and his son, Vito, in the middle of the woods. Arnott is affable toward Ben but also clear about his plan to kill The Boss before catching a ride to the moon. Arnott's hired guide turns out to be Tomos, Ben's former supervisor. The situation worsens when the chip in Ben's pack sounds an alert that The Boss is nearby. Ben narrowly escapes the hunters as they try to take the chip from him. It's no longer The Boss's life that's on the line; it's Ben's too. Violence, unexpected betrayal and spilt blood colors this intense story of survival.
Somer (Fishbowl; Imperfections) takes a simple pro-environmental argument and hides it deep inside a thrilling survival-of-the-fittest action story that could (and should) very likely cause people to take climate change more seriously. --Paul Dinh-McCrillis, freelance reviewer