First in the DAIMONES trilogy by a physicist at Cerne - that description takes a lot of living up to. Thousands of fishes and birds are dying suddenly all around the world. Naturalists can't find a cause, while politicians concentrate on terrorism or economic collapse. The deaths however are not a problem, but a symptom. Trouble's coming.

Dan works in a high-tech, high pressure job in Switzerland. When he loses his job it's almost a relief. He has a normal home life so now he can relax for a while and look around. Charting patterns of animal colony collapse - which now include hundreds of gorillas - Dan worries that the creatures dying now are higher up the evolutionary tree. A storm overnight shakes his mountainous home, but next day the aftermath is shocking. The story becomes darker as Dan discovers people dead on the roads, at the wheels of cars, even in bed. The internet is up, but not updated. Twitter is down. Phones go unanswered.

Dan is a convincingly real person, with the resources to run a Facebook ad as a 'message in a bottle' to other survivors and watch live-feed webcams for movement. He stocks up on free goods, of course, to feed and protect his family. Since some animals have survived, he thinks about dogs, wolves... and other, desperate, survivors.

As the months pass the land starts looking like an 'Earth After Us' programme. What would you do? And if you thought you had found a survivor, would you be pleased, or paranoid? How do you think he would be feeling? Especially if he thought alien beings were responsible for the deaths?

The style of writing is extremely readable and grounded so anyone from older teen age could pick up on the tale, but there are some adult scenes and concepts. I'm pleased that we don't get a horror story; while there are bodies, there is no ghoulishness. Less easy on the eyes is a long explanation at the end, whose astronomy was readable but trails of losses over aeons less so. I would have liked an explanation for the animal deaths. Massimo Marino has put himself into the shoes of his main character and given us a nail-biting dystopian SF tale, DAIMONES, to consider with care. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the Daimones trilogy.